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  WOMEN, CHILDREN, LOVE AND MARRIAGE




  WOMEN, CHILDREN,
  LOVE and MARRIAGE

  BY
  C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY

  AUTHOR OF “THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMAN,” “WOMEN’S WILD OATS,”
  “MOTHER AND SON,” ETC.

  [Illustration]

  LONDON
  HEATH CRANTON, LIMITED
  6 FLEET LANE E.C.4
  1924

  _Printed in Great Britain for Heath Cranton, Ltd., by Clements Bros.,
      Chatham_

  And we won’t, we simply _will not_ face the world as we’ve made it,
  and our own souls as we find them, and take the responsibility. We’ll
  never get anywhere till we stand up man to man and face _everything_
  out, and break the old forms, but never let our pride and courage of
  life be broken.

                                    D. H. LAURENCE in “Aaron’s Rod.”




CONTENTS

                                                                  PAGE

  Foreword                                                          11


  SECTION I.—WOMEN                                                  13

  1. Women and Cats                                                 15

  2. The Women of Spain                                             19

  3. The Dangerous Age                                              29

  4. The Legal Position of the Mother                               35

  5. Problems of Birth Control                                      37


  SECTION II.—CHILDREN                                              41

  1. A Boy’s Misery                                                 43

  2. Criminals Made in Our Nurseries                                49

  3. The Tyranny of Parents                                         51

  4. The Superfluous Father                                         55

  5. The Perfect Mother                                             59

  6. Nobody’s Children                                              61

  7. Let Us Pension the Mothers                                     71

  8. Boy and Girl Offenders and Adult Misunderstanding              73

  9. New Ways of Teaching Children                                  79

  10. Difficulties and Mistakes in Sex Education                    87

  11. Sex Instruction. The Age at which Knowledge Should
        be given                                                   107

  12. The Myth of the Virtuous Sex                                 113

  13. Sentimental Tampering with Difficult Problems
        with some Remarks on Sex Favouritism                       117

  14. The Seduction of Men                                         123

  15. Playing with Love                                            127


  SECTION III.—MARRIAGE AND OTHER RELATIONSHIPS                    131

  1. Is Passionate Love the Surest Foundation for
       Marriage?                                                   133

  2. Marriage Reform                                               139

  3. To-day’s Ideas on Marriage. Are we seeking
       vainly after happiness?                                     141

  4. Why Men are Unfaithful                                        145

  5. Why Wives are Unfaithful                                      149

  6. Should Doctors Tell?                                          157

  7. The Modern Wife and the Old-fashioned Husband                 161

  8. The Temporary Gentleman and his Young Wife                    165

  9. Is Marriage Too Easy?                                         169

  10. Passionate Friendships                                       173

  11. Conclusion—Regeneration                                      187

  INDEX                                                            189




FOREWORD


The essays here collected were written on various occasions over a
considerable space of time. This will account for the diversity in the
subjects and for a certain amount of restatement of my own beliefs and
position.

I have not thought it advisable to attempt to alter this, since though
some of the things I have said before may be repeated, the point of
view and special application are in each case different.

Some of the essays have appeared already in various journals, but all
have been very carefully revised and altered and the great majority
entirely re-written.

In spite of the diversity of the subjects there is a common idea
beneath all the essays—a common back-ground of faith. I do not know
whether I am justified in my confidence that this idea—this faith is
abundantly manifest. If I should try to formulate it into one short
statement, I should say it was the responsibility that the old have to
the young—the debt that one generation owes to the next.

In my gospel there is one commandment which may not be broken: _Ye
shall not hurt a little child._

                                             C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY.

  MERTON PARK,
  _March, 1924_.




SECTION I

WOMEN




WOMEN AND CATS


In an admirable speech that I heard a few weeks ago, women were likened
to cats. I do not remember exactly in what connection, however this
does not matter.

But this remark set me thinking—it was not the first time, by many,
that I had heard a man sum up the evil characteristics possessed, or
supposed to be possessed, by my sex by likening us to cats. I now asked
myself was this true? I want to be frank. Let me confess at once that I
have come to the conclusion that the speaker was right. Women and cats
have many qualities in common. I have another confession to make. When
I first thought of this question of women and cats, I am bound to say
that I felt that I did not like either cats or women, in fact I was not
sure that I didn’t dislike them.

But wait, please, my sisters, before you let your anger fall upon me.
This knowledge was so wounding to my self-pride that it forced me
into an inquiry. I had made a fatal mistake. I soon found the reason
of my dislike. I had been thinking of women and cats as a class and
not as individuals. I disliked them just as one dislikes the Chinese,
Portuguese, pigs or almost any other class of beings thought of
collectively. Of course this is absurd, but then nine times out of
every ten we are absurd—or unreasonable, which is the same thing, and
only by recognising this can we find the truth. Who is there who has
never admired some individual cat? Is there any misogynist who has
never loved some individual woman?

Before I come to the real subject of this woman—cat likeness, I would
like to say that we women are a little tired of being classed _en
masse_. We really are growing wearied of hearing about ourselves. We
claim to be appraised as individuals, some good, some bad, most of us a
compound of good qualities and bad, but not all alike, not collective.
We object to this communion of character. I remember talking to a
Frenchman about Englishwomen. He said, “By the ones and the twos you
are charmantes, très charmantes, but altogether—no—horrible!” This male
logic is ridiculous. Men revile us as a class and sell their bodies and
souls to us as individuals.

Now let us look further—What are the class-cat qualities that are also
the class-woman qualities?

Few subjects are at once so easy and so difficult to approach as this
one of woman and also of cat—our tiny, intimate tiger. We may purr
commonplaces, or scratch and spit rage, but the illusive individuality
of women and cats escapes description. Yes, the more I consider this
subject of women and cats the more convinced I am that this likeness is
a compliment to my sex. Like Balaam’s ass of old those who set out to
curse us are made to bless.

For a moment I want you to think of a beautiful kitten, of her
brilliant devilry, her perfect curves, the elusive wonder of her
unwinking eyes like orange flowers, the delicate nuances of expression
in her tail. Now, I want you to ask yourselves the nature of your
regard for this perfect animal. You prize her rather for her beauty,
than for her friendship. You call her pet, idiotic names, play with
her, then go away and forget her.

The kitten grows up, becomes a cat, and old. She ceases to interest
you. Her work is now to catch mice—to serve you. Do you think the cat
does not feel this change in her mode of life—this too sudden loss of
joy, which is forced upon her as soon as she attains her maturity.
If you doubt this, make a real friend—not a plaything—of a kitten.
We did this once. The kitten passionately loved my husband; when he
went walking she went part of the distance with him; often she waited
for him, or watched for his return loudly purring a welcome. Then my
husband proved faithless; the kitten grew old and less beautiful, and
we got a dog; he ceased to notice her. That cat died; yes, slowly pined
away from grief. I acknowledge all cats are not so sensitive; they
have not been made friends. The common cat develops an immense power
of ignoring your past passionate and playful petting. She becomes
distantly indifferent, or coquettishly variable—purring at one hour,
scratching at another. She remembers her past; she understands what you
valued in her. All that is herself she keeps for herself.

Contrast the cat with the dog. The blind worship of the one, the
exquisitely calm indifference of the other. The dog accepts you,
whatever treatment you give him, because you have loved him for
himself—made him your companion, your friend. But can you expect this
from the cat? You have never made her your friend; you have not found
it worth while to understand her. She deceives you. She scratches you
with those exquisite velvet paws do you annoy her. You cannot teach
her not to thieve. But why? She has no other weapon, and the great
life force urges her to self-protection. And how splendidly she defends
herself; how persistent and how successful she is in gaining her
desires. And how well she understands the advantages that beauty gives
to her; advantages she can gain from nothing else. There is something
really splendid in the trouble the cat takes over her personal attire;
to keep the seductive whiteness of her shirt front’s pretty fur, the
glossy shine of her splendid tiger skin. The dog would be quite happy
and proud when dirty—ugliness is allowed to him. But the cat!—only when
her self-respect is dead can she neglect to be beautiful.

Yes, now I have come to think about cats, I am filled with adoration.
With every force against her the cat has kept her power! Her rudeness
is sublime! Her aloofness is adorable! You may scratch her chin, she
will permit this if she feels inclined, but the allowing of this
familiarity does not forward your intimacy with her in the least—she
knows what your advances mean. Sometimes she will not respond to your
supplications—you cannot compel her. She wishes to sit upon your lap,
a dozen times you send her down and each time she returns; you want
her to sit upon your lap, and a dozen times she refuses and jumps
down. She imposes her will upon you with a lordship that admits of no
dispute. The personality of the cat is persistent and overwhelming,
she is inconceivably herself. Nothing living—no, not even woman—is so
self-supporting—I do not mean this economically, but artistically,—and
self-centred as the cat. She is the great ego—the supreme type of the
Super-Me.

I have said almost nothing at all about the character of woman. Is it
necessary? I think not.




THE WOMEN OF SPAIN


Wherever I go in Spain, in the streets of the towns, in the churches,
in the work-rooms, I am impressed with the fine types of the women;
their strength and quietness—the same quality which Valeria, the
Spanish novelist, speaks of as “a notable robustness.”

There is a fascination about Spanish women not easy to define. Not all
of them are beautiful, and it is, of course, easy to find women of
all degrees of ugliness, but the proportion of those who are strong
and beautiful seems to me to be very large. There is greater variety
of types in northern than in southern Spain. While there are many
women who are dark, with golden complexions, and quite Arabian eyes, a
proportion of fair women will be found with bright brown, auburn, and
some, even golden hair. One sees rosy complexions and blue eyes that
remind one of England; though mixed grey eyes are more frequent. Many
of the faces have finely modelled features, quite classic in outline.
Certainly the most beautiful and distinguished faces are not found
among the women of the so-called upper classes, but belong to the
fish-girls and market-women of the towns and the peasants of the rural
districts. And this presence of a really fine type among the workers of
a race is a certain indication of an old civilisation.

Many of the women workers in northern Spain are singularly individual.
They are usually tall, and have very distinct features, especially the
nose. It is a face in which every line has character, much strength,
and also humour, rising quickly to the beautiful eyes, but slowly
to the mouth, lengthening it into a smile. They all look like women
whom no man could venture to insult. I do not know whether one must
attribute it to their dress—the vivid coloured handkerchiefs which set
their faces, as it were, in an Oriental frame—but these women have a
serious, passionate look, which is completely fascinating. They are
different from the women of southern Spain, who are smaller, more
graceful, perhaps more piquant, but certainly less beautiful.

Living in Spain, you come to understand that this land is really the
connecting link between Europe and Africa. Both in their physical
traits and in their character, the Spaniards show their relation to the
North African type; seldom, indeed, is a Spaniard entirely a European.
And it is amongst the women that the resemblance stands out most
clearly. There are women with dark long African faces. You will see
them among the _flamencos_ of Seville or in the gipsy quarter of the
Camino del Sacre-Monte at Granada,—women with slow sinuous movements,
which you notice best when you see them dance, and wonderful eyes that
flash a slow fire, quite unforgettable in their strange beauty. In
dress you still find the Oriental love of bright and violent colours.
The elegant Manilla shawls and the mantillas which give such special
distinction to the women of southern Spain, are modifications of the
Eastern veil. The elaborately dressed hair, built up with combs, with
one rose or carnation giving a note of colour, has also a very ancient
origin.

Racial types may nearly always be best studied in the women of a
nation, and this is certainly so in a very old civilisation like
Spain, where many forces have combined to waste the men of the race.
Representing as they do both on the physical and psychic side a
conservative tendency, and with a lower variational aptitude than men,
women preserve more markedly primitive racial elements of character.
This may possibly explain why the women of Spain, on the whole, are
finer than the men.

How well I recall these women as I have seen them often, gathered for
the morning markets in the towns; chaffering, laughing, and carrying
on their work in the conversational Spanish manner. Here is commercial
activity united with a picturesque beauty, unspoilt by the usual
ugliness of business. Ugliness is not a necessary growth of progress.
There is terrible poverty in Spain. The peasants in the country and
the labourers in the towns suffer much injustice in too heavy rents
and an unfair burden of taxation. But as I have come to know them,
I have realised that the sum of their poverty is, after all, so much
less than the sum of their knowledge of the art of living. Not their
poverty, but their splendid capacity for eluding its misery, is what is
so remarkable. These workers have colour not only in their dresses, but
in their souls.

I see again a charming scene that I chanced upon one day in the
beautiful town of Vigo, which is situated in Galicia, in the extreme
north-west, and is one of the seaports by which the stranger enters
Spain. The day was saddened with heavy rain; a company of girls, who
had just finished their work of packing the fish for market, had
gathered in two empty railway vans, and were dancing together, in the
most delightful way, watched and applauded by a group of youths.

It was a dance of quick movement and of great variety. It was not a
dance of the feet only, every part of the girls’ bodies played its
part in the performance, the swaying figures, the beckoning hands,
the glittering smiles, that came and went in their dark eyes—all
contributed to the dance, which like all Spanish dances was a love
drama of intense passion; but always decorous, always beautiful. And
the watching youths took their part by a rhythmic clapping of hands and
stamping of feet. There was something infectious in this spontaneous
gaiety. These girls, I felt, understand happiness, and, as I watched
them, the world seemed once more a place in which workers could have
their share of the joy of living.

Nor does this overflowing and joyous vigour belong to youth alone. I
have seen mothers, stout and matronly, at play in the national games,
throwing large heavy balls of wood along the grass with a healthy
pleasure in muscular movement. Women, no longer young, may as often be
seen dancing as the girls. Well, I remember one woman; she was quite
old, and her skin was a yellowed mass of wrinkles. But the wrinkles
on her face were but the work of time and the hardness of living, and
went no deeper than the skin; they had not touched her soul. She was a
little bowed, yet she held herself finely, as indeed, do all Spanish
women. I shall never forget her perfect absence of self-consciousness;
her abandonment as she quivered all over with the excitement of the
dance—and she used her castanets with the innocent coquetry of a young
girl. There is something that may well give thought in this wholesome
energy, which is so abundant as to find its expression in play.

If I have emphasised the physical qualities of the women workers of
Spain, it is because I regard these qualities as being the outward
expression of intelligence and will. It is true that Spanish women are
not educated as we count education; many of them cannot read or write.
But in no other land can women be found with a finer understanding of
all that is essential in womanhood.

From the earliest notices we have of Spanish women we find them
possessed of a definite character of remarkable strength. Courage and
strength have throughout the centuries been common qualities among
Spanish women. The history of the _mujeres varoniles_ of this land
would fill a volume: women who would take the field and fight with a
sagacity and ferocity equal to, and often surpassing, that of men.

We may still associate the position of women with some of the old
traditions. Women are held in honour. Many primitive customs survive,
in particular among the Basques; and one of the most interesting is
that by which in some districts a daughter takes precedence over the
sons in inheritance of land and family property. As far back as the
fourth century, Spanish women insisted on retaining their own names
after marriage, for we find the Synod of Elvira trying to limit this
freedom. The practice is still common for sons to use the name of the
mother coupled with that of the father, and even in some cases alone,
showing the absence of preference for paternal descent. Velazquez, for
instance, is known to the world only by the name of his mother: his
father’s name was de Silva. It is significant that in no country does
less stigma fall on a child born out of wedlock; and the unmarried
mother meets a recognition that is rarely accorded to her elsewhere. I
questioned a cultured Spaniard on the position of the prostitute; his
answer is worth recording, “Our women give themselves for love much
more often than for money.” This statement may have some extravagance,
but I believe it corresponds to a real fact in the position of women,
which persists from a time when their liberty was greater than it is
to-day. The introduction of modern institutions, and especially the
empty form of chivalry, has lowered the position of women. Emilia Pardo
Bazan, the great woman novelist of Spain, has said, “All the rights
belong to men, and the women have nothing but duties.” Yet there can
be no question that some features of mother-right have left their
imprint on the domestic life of Spain, and that women have in certain
directions preserved a freedom and privilege which in England have
never been established, and only of late claimed.

The industrial side of primitive culture has always belonged to women,
and in many provinces in Spain the old custom is in active practice,
owing to a shortage of men through military service and widespread
emigration. The farms are worked by women, the ox carts driven by
women, the seed is sown and reaped by women,—indeed, all the work is
done by women. And the point to notice here is that the women have
benefited by this enforced engaging in activities, which in most
countries have been absorbed by men. The fine physical qualities of
these workers is evident. I have taken pains to gain all possible
information on this question. Statistics are not available because in
Spain they have not been kept from this point of view. It is, however,
the opinion of many eminent doctors, who were questioned by a Spanish
friend for me on this subject, that this labour does not damage the
health or beauty of the women, but the contrary, nor does it prejudice
the life and health of their children.

I have seen many charming scenes of labour; and among my memories
a visit I paid to a sardine factory in the town of Vigo stands out
clearly. The work-rooms open directly on to the bay; here the boats
come, the fish are landed and the silver heaps are washed. The airy
rooms were scarcely redolent even of fish; and the most scrupulous
cleanliness was evident. They were filled with girls, women, men, and
boys. I learnt that both the women and men are well paid, and that
there is no separation between the tasks allotted to the two sexes.
Women and men labour together side by side, capacity alone deciding
the kind of work done. The day’s work is the eight hours, established
in Vigo by arrangement between the masters and the workers; but when a
large catch of sardines comes in it must be dealt with at once, and
the workers are then paid overtime on a higher scale than their weekly
wages. I saw many ingenious and labour-saving machines, one, which
was worked by a boy, made the keys for opening the tins at the rate
of 140 a minute. I learnt that most of the machinery is supplied by
Germany. I was interested to hear that the waste pieces of tin, left
from cutting the boxes, were shipped to that country, to be used for
making toys. It was not, however, in these things that I found my chief
interest. What I chiefly remember was the fine appearance of the women.
I was impressed with their smiling and contented faces. Many of them
are mothers, and there is an admirable créche in connection with the
sardine factory, where the children are cared for. A more industrious
and charming scene of labour it would be impossible to find. I lost no
opportunity of inquiry into local industrial conditions. The workers in
this town are in a very favourable position, and in many respects Vigo
has attained to a degree of humane development under industrial life,
which other countries are toiling to achieve.

As workers the women are most conscientious and intelligent, apt to
learn, and ready to adopt improvements. From my personal observations
I can bear witness that their cottages, though very poor, are usually
clean, and their children are universally well cared for. Nowhere are
children happier or more loved than in Spain. The women are full of
energy and vigour even to an advanced age. They are certainly healthy.
I once witnessed an interesting episode during a motor-ride in the
country districts of the north. A robust and comely Spanish woman was
riding _a ancas_ (pillion fashion) with a young _caballero_, probably
her son. The passing of our motor frightened the steed, with the result
that both riders were unhorsed. Neither was hurt, but it was the woman
who pursued the runaway horse; she caught it without assistance and
with surpassing skill. What happened to the man I cannot say. When I
saw him he was standing in the road brushing the dust from his clothes.
I presume the woman returned with the horse to fetch him.

Women were the world’s primitive carriers. In Spain I have seen women
bearing immense burdens, unloading boats, acting as porters and as
firemen, and removing household furniture. I saw one woman with a chest
of drawers easily poised upon her head, another woman bore a coffin,
while another, who was old, carried a small bedstead. A beautiful
woman porter in one village carried our heavy luggage, running with
it on bare feet without sign of effort. She was the mother of four
children, and her husband was at the late Cuban war. She was as upright
as a young pine, with the shapeliness that comes from perfect bodily
equipoise. I do not wish to judge from trivial incidents, but I have
found in these Spanish women a strength and beauty that has become rare
among women to-day. When a fire breaks out in a small town or village
it is the women water-carriers who act as firemen. They fetch the
water from fountains and pour it upon the flames. Just recently I have
read of three of these women who lost their lives in an attempt to
rescue a cripple girl from a burning house.

I was never tired of looking at the Spanish water-carriers;
the fountains that are in every town are the most delightful
watching-places. The grace with which the women walk on the uneven
roads and their perfect skill in balancing their beautiful _jarras_ of
stone or copper called forth my unceasing admiration. One result of
this universal burden-carrying on the head is the perfect and dignified
character of the women’s manner of walking. These women walk like
priestesses who are bearing sacred vessels. They move erectly, but
without stiffness, with a secure and even stride, planting the foot and
heel together, light and firmly. There is something of the grace of
an animal in their movements—the alertness, the perfect balance, the
suggestion of hidden strength. I recall a conversation I had once with
an Englishman, of the not uncommon strongly patriotic and censorious
type. We were walking on the quay at La Coruna; he pointed to a group
of women-bearers, who were at work unloading a vessel, and said in his
indiscriminate British gallantry, “I can’t bear to see women doing work
that ought to be done by men.” “Look at the women!” was the answer I
made him.

It is interesting to contrast the robust heroines of Spanish writers
with the feminine feebleness and inanity which so often are the ideal
of English novelists. In Spanish literature vigour and virility, are
qualities apart from sex and are bestowed on women equally with men.

Again and again the thoughtful reader will be struck with this in the
works of the Spanish writers. It is a point of such interest that
one would like to linger upon it. I may mention, as one instance,
Cervantes’ heroines: the “illustre Fregona,” “beautiful, with cheeks
of rose and jessamine, and as hard as marble,” and Sancho’s daughter,
who was “tall as a lance, as fresh as an April morning, and as strong
as a porter.” Of Tirso de Molina, the great Spanish dramatist, it has
been said that he gives “all vigour to his women and all weakness to
his men.” Nor has this robust ideal of womanhood changed. We meet the
same qualities among the women depicted by the Spanish writers to-day.
Blasco Ibanez, in his “Flor de Mayo,” describes a young woman who could
meet “a stolen embrace with a superb kick, which more than once had
felled to the ground a big youth as strong and firm as the mast of
his boat.” Among the heroines of Juan Valera we find “Juanita” who,
“as a girl could throw stones with such precision that she could kill
sparrows, and leap on the back of the wildest colt or mule,” while Dona
Luz “could dance with a sylph, ride like an Amazon, and in her walk
resembled the divine huntress of Delos.”

It may of course be argued that these are chosen types that cannot
fairly be said to represent Spanish women. Yet the Spanish writers
are realists in a much truer sense than is understood amongst English
novelists, and it must be admitted that the persistence of the same
qualities in so many heroines proves a fundamental veracity in the type
presented; and from my own experience, I can testify that the women I
have known, in their vigour and independence, show the qualities of
these portrait women.

The fact can scarcely be passed over that these heroines almost all
belong to the country districts, sometimes even to the poorest people,
and if, as in the case of “Dona Luz,” they spring from a different
class, they are, as a rule, illegitimate, combining aristocratic
distinction with plebian vigour. This corresponds with my own
observations. I have found the women workers more robust and more
intelligent than the women of the middle and upper classes.

Nor is the explanation far to seek. The preparation that these women
receive for life is far inferior to that of the workers, who co-operate
with men, and whose lives are as actively productive, and work as
capably performed. The women of the richer classes lead lives of
marked inferiority; without opportunity for work, and compelled to an
existence of restricted activity, it is impossible to develop their
physical and intellectual qualities.

Most of these ladies, except when quite young, are stout, they
are less intelligent than the peasants, and few of them have ever
appealed to me as being beautiful. I hasten to add, however, that
they all have the fascination that belongs to Spanish women; a charm
not easy to define. I have spoken of this quality before, let me try
to make it clearer now. I believe it is that all these “senoras”
and “senoritas” understand that they are women, and instead of this
bringing them unhappiness and causing, as it so often does, the
indefinite unquietness that characterises so many English and American
women, you feel that they are glad that this is so. This is why they
are so attractive. Spanish women are in harmony with themselves, which
gives them something of that exquisite appeal which belongs to all
natural things. This is the reason too, why the older women are so
good-humoured, smiling and gay; they have none of them missed their
womanhood.

Here is the real reason of the admiration which these women so
universally arouse,—as women they are so perfect. This is a question
that reaches very deeply; it is a quality so easy to see, so difficult
to explain. What I wish to make clear is that the modern English ideal
for women leaves a wide margin open to desire; the innermost forces of
life too often are left unsatisfied, while the women of Spain, with
all their restrictions, know what it is that, after all, really brings
happiness for women. Which is the wiser knowledge?

The restrictions for women will pass with the expansion of modern life,
and then the strong personality of Spanish women, their energy and good
sense, will inevitably find expression when opportunity is given to
them. But never can they fall, in pursuit of outside things, into the
error of forgetfulness of their womanhood. There does not appear to be
any vagueness in the souls of these women: our women have so often too
much. In the composed presence of the Spanish ladies I have felt that
it is little profit to a woman if, in gaining the world, she should
lose herself.




THE DANGEROUS AGE

A TRACT FOR THE TIMES


I

Under this title the Danish writer, known as Karin Michaelis, in the
far-back years before the war—a time now marked as the terrible period
of the suffrage craze, gave to the world a remarkable and intimate
revelation of a woman. It is perhaps the most illuminating work that
has been written in recent years about women, from its rare quality of
femininity, expressed with an unconscious sincerity and biting truth.

It is very late in the day to describe a book which, though now
forgotten, was, at the time of its publication, very widely read and
still more widely criticised and discussed in almost all European
countries. It appeared at a time of great feminist unrest, which
accounts, to some extent, for the reception it gained.

The story matters very little, for it is not as the confession of one
woman that “The Dangerous Age” gains its importance, it is because it
affords a diagnosis of an old and a very great evil, as well it is an
acute observation of a certain type of woman’s soul or character.

It is from this aspect that I wish to approach it, and for this reason
I have called it “A Tract for the Times.”

Thus it is of very little importance to my present purpose that the
book is not a new one. It does not matter if the story is remembered,
or indeed, if the book itself has, or has not, been read. If the reader
will recall to his or her mind any one of the restless, unsatisfied
women they must know—women, not young but not old, they will have the
history (the variety in the details will not matter at all) of Elsie
Lindtner, the heroine of this story.

This admirable piece of observation deals with a section of women who
have come into being through our industrial civilisation with its
wrong ideals and stupid customs. Marcel Prévost[1] in his preface to
the book, speaks of Elsie Lindtner’s confession as a revelation of
the feminine soul of all time. With the latter part of this opinion I
entirely disagree. Rather would I say that it is a revelation of the
soul of woman as that soul has been evolved through the repression of
natural instincts and the want of satisfying fields for the expression
of energy, in an atmosphere which very surely gives birth to the modern
demons of confused desires and unconscious unhappiness.

The title of the book is not, I think, well chosen. The Dangerous
Age—Elsie Lindtner was forty-two when she wrote her confession—was
dangerous because of the life which had preceeded it. There is,
without doubt, a cleavage in life, which may be said to be marked by
the diminishing of attraction towards the opposite sex. But this is
common to men as well as to women. It belongs to no special age, and
its proportion of danger to the individual rests, first on the fulness
or poverty of experience before this period arrives, and secondly on
the power to extract from the past the joyous impulse for continuous
living. But to Elsie Lindtner, as to all women of such false and
restricted experience, it was far more than a cleavage, and because she
had never lived simply and completely, she experienced that emptiness
which strikes the soul with death when the consciousness comes that the
opportunities of life are passing.

The terror of approaching age robbed her of all her hope of future
happiness, just because she had emptiness in her past.

It is easy to condemn her, to speak of her selfishness, her falseness,
her colossal egoism—there are few adjectives of condemnation that I
have not heard applied to the Elsie Lindtner’s of life. Yet if we look
at the matter rightly, rather ought we to admire her for the perfect
self-sacrifice with which she pursued the one occupation.


II

The question at its root is one of right functioning. For mark the real
point of Elsie Lindtner’s history is this: all her actions were based
on search for pleasure. To gain the possessions of this world was the
fixed aim for which she bartered her soul. What does she tell us in
one of her letters? She is writing of her school-days. A class mate
had said to her, “Of course, a prince will marry you, for you are the
prettiest girl here.” She carried the words home to a maid who added to
the poison:

“That’s true enough,” she said, “a pretty face is worth a pocketful of
gold.”

“Can one sell a pretty face, then?” the child asked.

“Yes, to the highest bidder,” was the answer given.

The seed thus sown gave a rich harvest. Sex-trade became the object,
which Elsie Lindtner pursued with the same unflinching purpose
which directs all those who create for themselves the false gods of
possessions. Truly, while we support with our praise the successful
financier, we cannot in justice give less esteem to the woman who
pursues the same end in the way that is the easiest and surest of
success.

It is no part of my purpose to give a resumé of the history of Elsie
Lindtner. The details matter little; a structure of life built on a
false foundation must of necessity fall to ruin. And there is another
point I wish to make clear. The destroying penalty paid by this woman
for the gain of wealth and position was a failure of the power to
love. The real explanation of her unrest, hysteria, and manifold
symptoms of excitement was caused by the unceasing warfare within her
of two antagonistic forces—the desire for comfort and ease, partly
instinctive, but also fixed by habit, strengthened by a wish to keep
the moral dignity imposed upon women by the conditions of the society
in which she lived, fighting with the deeply instinctive desire for
satisfying sex experience to fulfil the functioning of life.

It is necessary for women to speak plainly. You cannot deny the needs
of the body, or prostitute their use, without the soul paying its
penalty. That is what women too often forget. A false purity held Elsie
Lindtner from giving herself to her lover, Jorgen Mallthe, and kept her
faithful in the letter of the law to the husband she had married for
his wealth. She had no children. I say without any doubt that she would
have been a purer and a better, because a happier and more healthy
woman, if she had followed the cry of her heart, at the first, as she
was driven in the end to want to do—when it was too late. That she did
not do this, but chose to sacrifice her lover in the same way that
she had sacrificed her husband must, in my opinion, be counted as sin
against her. Only the falseness which had wrapped her own life in a net
of pretence could have made her fail to see the truth for herself.

It is a fact of very special importance that Elsie Lindtner and all
the women who enter into this book belong to the Scandinavian race,
among whom chastity was extolled as the chief virtue of a woman, while
any lapse was punished with terrible severity. If the husband of an
ancient Dane discovered his wife in adultery he was allowed to kill
and castrate her lover. “There is a city,” says the Scandinavian Edda,
“remote from the sun, the gates of which face the north, poison rains
there through a thousand openings, the place is all composed of the
carcasses of serpents. There run certain torrents, in which are plunged
the bodies of the perjurers, assassins, and those who seduce married
women. A black-winged dragon flies incessantly round and devours the
bodies of the wretched who are there imprisoned.” Again, the Icelandic
Hava Maél contains this caustic apophthegm “Trust not the words of a
girl, neither to those which a woman utters, for their hearts have been
made like the wheel that turns round; levity was put into their bosoms.
Trust not to the ice on one day’s freezing, neither to the serpent
which lies asleep, nor to the caresses of her you are going to marry.”


III

Now, it may be asked: What has all this to do with Elsie Lindtner? My
answer is: “Everything!” The customs of a past social life do subsist
beneath the surface of modern society; we cannot without strong effort
escape from the chains of our inheritance. In the sad nations of the
cold north, where the natural joy of the body has been regarded as
something to be fought with and denied, a perpetual confusion has
arisen at the very source of life. For the sex-passion is a force, huge
and fateful, which has to be reckoned with. Woman is more primitive,
more intuitive, more emotional than man. And the outlets allowed to her
in the past have been more restricted; thus the price she pays for any
repression of the natural rights of love is heavier. Elsie Lindtner’s
history is a sermon to all those who set up the false god of chastity
for women.

I am aware that this statement will arouse opposition—especially in
women. To-day we hear much talk, and often among women who are working
nobly for the better life for women, of control of sex and the need of
imposing on men the same code of repression which for so long has been
imposed upon them. This is, of course, very natural, but that does not
make it wise. It is a truth realised by few women that repression is
not, and never can be, control. There seems to be a very widespread
opinion that to use the divine gift of sex even in marriage, for joy,
is wrong. One would be inclined to laugh, if the sadness of this
falsehood did not make one want to weep.

The whole subject, wide as life itself, escapes anything like adequate
treatment. The lady—the Elsie Lindtners of society—the household drudge
and the prostitute, are the three main types of women resulting in our
so-called civilisation of to-day, from the process of the past, and it
is hard to know which is the most wretched, which is the most wronged,
the most destructive, and the furthest removed from that ideal woman
which a happier future may evolve.

What, then, in conclusion, is the lesson to be learnt from this “Tract
for the Times?” Women must be free—free to work and free to love.
Then, and then only, can they claim to be the fitting mates of men,
then and then only, will they be able to fulfil aright their supreme
work as the mothers of the sons and daughters of the race. This is the
path along which freedom is to be found. What, then, is the individual
woman to do? This question is one which women at the present have to
answer for themselves. But one thing is certain—they must have the
courage to tear from their eyes the old and the new bandages that have
kept them, and still keep them, in the darkness of ignorance; better
even to sin and know the truth than to live in falsehood and in a
child’s world of pretence.




THE LEGAL POSITION OF THE MOTHER


In spite of the rapid advance that has been made, the legal
disabilities of women are still great. Especially is this so in their
relationship to their children.

Here where they should be supreme women have really no rights at all
under our laws.

They are not the legal parents of their own children. Only if their
child is illegitimately born, have they any rights of guardianship.
The law recognises the father as the one parent. He is entitled to the
custody of the children. He alone can say where they shall live or how
they shall be brought up: he alone has the legal right to decide how
they shall be educated or what religion they shall follow. No promise
that he makes, either before or after marriage is binding. The man may
change his mind at any time. The woman has no remedy. It is evident how
terrible a force for evil these rights may easily become in the hands
of an unscrupulous or vindictive man. If, for instance, the woman does
not choose to live where the husband directs, he may take her children
from her. Again, if there is any difference of opinion between the two
parents the opinion of the one parent—the father, must prevail. And
this is so even when the mother, and not he, is the supporter of the
family.

And the injustice continues even after death. The father has the right
to appoint a guardian to act with the mother, but a guardian appointed
by the mother can act only after both parents are dead. The children
have to be brought up according to any wishes expressed by the father
or even which it is inferred he has intended to express. This is
especially apt to cause trouble with regard to religion. Any relation
of the father (even when he himself has been either indifferent or
irreligious) may claim to have a woman’s children trained, _against
her wishes_, in the religion professed by the father’s family on the
ground that the father was nominally a member of that church.

Of course, when there is agreement between the parents, as happily is
the case in the great majority of marriages, the law does not matter.
Indeed very few mothers have any conception of their position under the
law. That is the only reason why these horrible and out-of-date laws
have not been repealed.

Fortunately they are unlikely to remain a dark blot upon our statute
book. An admirable Bill has been formulated under the direction of
the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, which will
remedy this long-standing injustice. It has the long title of the
Guardianship, Maintenance, Custody and Marriage of Infants Bill. Its
two great objects are:—

  (1) To make the mother as well as the father the legal parent of her
      children.

  (2) To impose upon both fathers and mothers the liability to maintain
      their children according to their means.

There are many further admirable provisions, as for instance, the one
which gives both parents equal rights in appointing guardians. Where
the child is under 16 and has no property, present or expectant, the
case may be dealt with in Courts of Summary Jurisdiction (or Police
Courts). This is most important, as it makes the benefits of the equal
guardianship possible to the working classes, which would not be so, if
cases, as at present, had to be heard in High Courts or County Courts.

I shall not trouble to answer the few determined obstructionists who
have opposed this Bill. They say that it will cause difficulty in the
home, and provide a reason for quarrel between husband and wife. I
have too high an opinion of men and women and of their love of their
children to believe this. The cases of dispute, sufficiently serious
to be brought into the courts, will always be comparatively few. And a
decision of justice will be much easier when the partners have an equal
status. Then the welfare of the children will be the decisive factor
and not as now, the desires of the parents.

Equal guardianship laws are in operation already in many countries: and
wherever they have been established they have worked excellently and
must be regarded as a complete success.




PROBLEMS OF BIRTH CONTROL


It is generally admitted that there is much to be gloomy about in these
days of bad trade and post-war morals. And yet, perhaps, the poor old
world does improve in some respects.

One of the most hopeful signs of this improvement to me is the very
widespread interest that has been taken of late in birth control.
Conferences are held, law-suits are fought and won; pamphlets are
written and in almost every town lectures are given, and everywhere
groups of earnest-minded people come together to discuss and to learn.
Our sense of responsibility has been quickened in connection with
birth and the bringing a new life into the world. In a deeper and
more practical way we have come to know that no child should be born
_unwanted_.

Now, possibly all this suggests no very great moral advance to you. It
may be that you regard it as wrong to regulate births in any way. Yet
surely it is well for this difficult problem to be carefully considered
in open discussion. To avoid error we must have knowledge. For myself,
as I have listened to speakers or read of what is being done, though
possibly I am in sharp opposition to much that is believed and advised,
yet always I am glad when I reflect that only a little while ago the
very mention of birth control would have been impossible at any public
meeting, nor would any paper have noticed it.

Everywhere since the war the increased interest in the question has
been astonishing. Is it, I have asked myself, that the terrible loss of
life has forced us at last to have a deeper understanding of the value
of life? Certainly all over the world women and men are beginning to
understand the right of every child to be well-born.

The relations between the poverty of the family and its size must be
considered in connection with this question. Much stress is also
rightly laid on the injurious effect on the mother of continuous and
unwilling child-bearing, and on the resulting terrible wastage of life
in mis-carriages and still-births. Personally, I should always like to
hear more of the effect on the children unfortunate enough to live.
_For the child is unfortunate who is born into a home unwanted by its
mother._

To give life well it must be given gladly. There can be no deeper
tragedy than an unwilling motherhood.

The moral and religious aspects of family limitation have to be
considered. It needs to be emphasised how more and more religion to-day
refuses to divorce the spiritual from the material necessities of man,
and how it begins to appreciate that the bread-and-butter difficulties
of life have the greatest effect on the moral character of the people.

If a criticism on the work of those who advocate birth control may be
offered, it is that too much time is spent in saying what everyone
agrees with. Propositions, which all who think at all practically
accept, are gravely supported with elaborate arguments. More might
be accomplished if these elementary questions were left and freer
discussions given to the many grave problems which still await
investigation. There are so many questions on which far more knowledge
needs collecting before any definite conclusions of permanent value can
be accepted.

Roughly classified, birth control needs to be studied from three
different aspects:—

First, there is the effect upon the married couple.

Second, there is the effect upon the child.

And lastly, there is the effect of voluntary limitation of the
birth-rate upon society.

In estimating the consequences to the man and the woman, it is
impossible to neglect the psychological results.

The effect upon the mind is far stronger and more lasting than any more
direct result. I mean, it is what the individual woman or man _feels_
about limitation that is important for them. It is their own attitude
to what they do that will mainly decide the results it will have. This
is a question of the deepest complication. And much more knowledge
is needed, and the greatest care is called for not to form hasty and
unproved opinions. It is, I must insist, an individual question that
can never be arbitrarilly decided, even by those competent to form a
decision. That is why so much that is said, even by doctors who ought
to know better, is so absurd.

Much easier to estimate is the effect upon the child. Here we seem to
be on firmer ground. To save the unwanted child from being born or
conceived by drunken or syphilitic parents is a work of such plain
morality that there would appear to be no room for difference of
opinion.

Yet the question is deeper and far more difficult than this; there
are, indeed, a whole group of problems connected with it. There is,
for instance, the case of the only child, who always suffers grave
disadvantages, brought up in a home with adults.

Again the childless or one-child marriage is often not happy for those
who love children. This is felt, in particular, when one partner
desires children and the other refuses to have them born. And it must
not be forgotten that all that affects the parents, must also have its
results on any child that is born. Apart from economic necessities, the
small, limited family is, in many ways, harder to bring up than the
large family.

With regard to the effect of birth control on society, it is now
becoming a familiar reflection that often those least fitted to carry
out parental duties, because of faults of character or misfortune of
circumstances, have the largest families.

Here the main problem is not so much to teach the mere knowledge of how
families are to be limited as to induce that control and to stir up
such desire as will lead to limitation being practised.

But of course, the alteration of the characters of men and women is a
task of too great difficulty to be treated as a side issue.

Yet I would not end with any word of discouragement. As I started by
saying, the mere consideration of these difficult questions in the
broad light of day must be felt, by all of us who are old enough to
remember the attitude in the past, as a wholesome sign of the times.

We care more, and very slowly we are growing more honest.




SECTION II

CHILDREN




A BOY’S MISERY


Quite the saddest thing I have come across for some time is the account
of the suicide from remorse of a widow, who drowned herself in utter
misery; her body being found near the spot where a fortnight before
that of her son, aged eleven, had been discovered. The boy, it seems
had committed suicide after being accused of stealing money belonging
to his mother.

Even from the bare outline of what happened there stands out stark,
like some haunting fiend of pain, the agony suffered by this boy and
mother before each sought the merciful quietness of death.

I find myself conscious of emotion stronger and more vexing than the
strangling sense of pity. I am angry at the waste of two lives, and
especially of the fine young life so grievously destroyed. Why, I ask
myself, do we torture children by forcing on their sensitive natures
punishment for failure in right conduct, while we make no attempt to
understand the hidden struggles and unexplained emotions that almost
always are the cause? How is it we fail to remember so completely our
own growth, the mistakes we made, the undiscovered sins that now we
have forgotten?

This boy stole from his mother. A thief you call him—a bad and
ungrateful son.

But wait—think! Why did he steal?

An easy question, perhaps, you will say to answer. He desired to buy
sweets, wished to visit the cinema; he had been betting with his
marbles and getting into bad habits; or he wanted to swagger as a
capitalist among his friends. Yes, that sounds probable enough; some
such were, I expect, the reasons given by the mother, probably believed
in by the boy himself. For so often we force the acceptance of our
adult stupidities upon our children. The poor boy counted himself a
thief, believed that he had sinned; he felt that he had wronged the
mother whom he loved so much. He did not know, for there was no one to
tell him, that he did not care at all for the money he stole for these
trivial reasons. No, he did not know. But underneath, hidden in the
darkness of his young soul, there was a stronger driving imperative,
unknown and unsuspected by any one, most of all by the boy himself,
which was the irresistible force that caused him to steal.

The reason of his action is really simple and would be recognised at
once by any psychologist. It must be sought in the relation of the boy
to his mother. He was not loved enough. At least, in some way, he was
unhappy in his home relationship—at conflict in his innermost nature.
He stole money, though, he did not know it, because he wanted love.

Of his life, through his eleven years, I lack the information that
would provide us with the necessary details of proof. It is exceedingly
improbable that the details will be forthcoming, for this boy was
unknown and his death even at the time, caused no stir. But it is a
very certain inference from the evidence of the excessive remorse that
drove him to take his own life that, sometime in his earlier years, he
had suffered some shock of jealousy or stress of misery in relation to
his mother, that initiated the trouble, which later had to force an
expression by means of his thefts.

I hope that I make my meaning clear. The idea of “transferring” a
feeling into a quite different action may be a little strange to you.
Yet everyone knows that, if you are angry with someone and dare not
show it, you may gain relief from some kind of violent action entirely
unconnected with the cause of the angry feelings. The boy who is afraid
of his father, or is otherwise unhappy in his home, is very likely
to be a “bully,” he takes what he has suffered out of someone weaker
than himself. And it is the same process when the suppressed painful
feelings of jealousy or other unhappiness take the form of spending
money. The impulse is so powerful that if the money cannot be got in
any other way, it will be stolen.

In many children there arises jealousy in connection with their home
relationships, often without reason, but none the less real to the
childish imagination, and this causes them to doubt the parental love
that is as necessary to them as the sun to the flower. In its mild
and practically harmless form this feeling of being neglected, which
few children quite escape, is only occasionally active and remains
unrecognised, though it is the frequent cause of irritability, of minor
sicknesses and faults in behaviour. The results in aggravated cases
are far more important, and cause, not infrequently, such a desperate
consciousness of inferiority, with an always pressing sense of wanting
something, that there arises an overpowering physical and spiritual
necessity for the liberation of the hidden trouble. This relief is
found usually in acts of violence, frequently in stealing.

In the case we are considering we see the boy, beyond all shadow
of doubt, over-sensitive, the symptoms of the unconscious trouble
expressing themselves, on the one side, in an exaggerated feeling
of inferiority, and, on the other, in a compelling need to find
opportunity for the assertion of power. I do not know just how it
happened. Maybe, his mother, who has paid with her life in passionate
remorse, was too hindered with the troublesome details of life to be
able to cultivate and pick the flowers of love. I cannot know, but _I
do know_ that in the tender psyche or soul of that poor boy was some
terrible need for his mother’s love—a want which he did not understand,
indeed, of which he was probably wholly unaware. He may even have been
in outward rebellion, have thought he was indifferent to his mother,
but such a state would but furnish further witness to the trouble
within. Had he known what it was he wanted, he would not have done what
he did. But the ever-disturbing need, causing confusion in his soul,
drove him to steal the most obvious thing that he was without and his
mother possessed—that was money.

I do not hesitate to state that in the great majority of cases of
boyish thieving the reasons for the act must be sought in some deeply
hidden cause, marking some inner disturbance, with a feeling of wanting
something which the boy does not understand. The taking of small
sums of money or other pilfering acts is a covering-mask, and has no
connection with crime. There is one thing further that it is necessary
to remember. Though the fault of boyish thieving is not in itself a
sign of any moral failure in the character, our treatment of such
small thefts—our adult stupidity in understanding the difficulties and
seeking out the concealed unhappiness of the young soul, often hounds
on the stealing boy into the thief.

We make criminals of the young because we are blind and hardened with
our own failures and minor struggles. We also cause, as in the case of
this boy who killed himself, the most heart-breaking tragedies. It is
appalling even to contemplate the suffering brought quite uselessly
upon boys and girls by grown-up foolish ignorance.

We show too little imagination in our treatment of the child who does
wrong. We rarely remember his almost terrible sensitiveness, nor do we
consider the unusual advantage (from the point of view of the child)
that we possess just in being grown-up. And nothing, as I have said
before, is to the boy plainer as a sign of this grown-up freedom than
the power we have (or rather that they think we have) to spend money
how we like and when we like. That is why the taking of money is one of
the most common symbolic acts for a boy’s wish for love or power.

That boyish theft is often pathological is proved by the fact that the
objects stolen are often useless to the boy, that they are hidden away,
and, as a rule, forgotten, and further that the boy forgets, or almost
forgets, what he has stolen or how he took them. Some boys have a
passion for stealing certain objects which they will take over and over
again. Those who have had anything to do with delinquent children well
know these symptoms.

In nearly all cases the thieving is repeated over long periods;
although each act may be followed by violent remorse. Parents and all
those who have to deal with these childish wrong doers, should know
that this sorrow, especially if it is emotionally excessive, serves
only to increase the tendency to a fresh repetition of the theft. For
remorse fixes the boy’s attention on his stealing, and, still more, on
the pleasurable feelings that unconsciously to himself are connected
with the act. He remembers these, though he does not know it, whenever
he thinks of his wickedness in stealing. And this fixity of attention
in itself is a kind of rehearsal of the act, that is very likely to
lead to an actual performance of it. Boyish remorse is, no doubt,
gratifying to parents, but, almost invariably, it is harmful to the boy.

Whenever the boy thinks how bad he is, how wrong and disastrous an act
would be, he is in danger of being compelled to perform that act. Most
of us have experienced this, but we forget its application to the moral
conduct of the young. Once think how terrible it would be to fall down
the precipice, and the idea of jumping down approaches.

Remorse is a form of temptation. And all forms of temptation should,
if possible, be avoided in dealing with the misconduct of children. If
your boy steals money do not leave money lying about. Also, even if he
has stolen money several times, express no faintest suspicion as to his
not using honourably any money entrusted to him, for some necessary
purpose, such as paying railway fares or buying a school book. Never be
suspicious over the change such a child brings you. As he steals from a
feeling of inferiority, and, in particular, because through jealousy,
whether imagined or real, he feels himself less blessed with the love
of those about him than other more confident children, any sign of your
not being able to trust him, must render him more liable to err.

If the thieving boy were treated with sympathy and understanding, and
loved and helped, instead of being blamed and often cruelly punished,
there would be fewer grown-up thieves.




CRIMINALS MADE IN OUR NURSERIES


Every child suffers sometimes from a feeling of inferiority. He is so
much smaller and weaker than the grown-ups who control his play and
his work that he feels uncomfortably helpless against their authority,
which to him seems often to be exercised in an arbitrary and unkind way.

There are times when this consciousness of being little and weak is
so overwhelming that the child is bound to do something to convince
himself of his own powerfulness.

It is then that he becomes naughty. For the very easiest way to
command the attention of his mother, and the other adults who are
with him, is by being naughty. Good, he is left alone. The grown-ups
go on with their own occupations. He feels neglected. At most he is
mildly praised. “Johnnie is a nice quiet boy to-day.” But this is very
different from the attention he commands when he is naughty. He defies
authority. For a short time he becomes a despot, ruling the grown-ups
who usually rule him. His sensation of power is intensely enjoyable.
And the more disturbance he makes in the nursery life the deeper is
his satisfaction. Of course, he is sorry afterwards. But his sorrow is
not really for the first period of successful rebellion, but for the
following time after his power fails.

Now, it is very important for the mother to understand this. The real
problem is to minimise as much as can be of the child’s enjoyment of
naughtiness.

Any unwisdom on the mother’s part such as her being too emotionally
concerned, indulging in nagging or violent anger, may have very serious
results. Inevitably the child feels as he sees his mother’s tears and
want of control, “I have caused this.” Instead of being weak he is
master of his mother. That is why usually he is good after he has been
naughty.

But this kind of nursery behaviour is disastrous to the child’s
character.

Let me tell you a rather striking story to illustrate this. A young
boy, very naughty, was sent to bed. His mother, greatly troubled, went
some hours later to his room. He was kneeling, praying. She thought he
was asking God to forgive him. But this was what she heard: “Please,
dear God, forgive my bad mummy for being so unkind to poor little
Freddy.” The boy grew up in the most unfortunate way. I cannot give
the details and there were, of course, several causes. Yet certainly
his character suffered the first wrong in the nursery from an unwise
emphasising by his mother of his own importance.

The naughty child is always the child over-occupied with thoughts
of himself. And his feelings are unhealthily important to him just
because he finds himself for some cause at a disadvantage. Parents,
unconsciously, but very foolishly, emphasise their children’s
inferiority; they speak of their weakness, tell them they are too
little to do this or that, never realising the danger of what they are
doing.

Children must not be subjected to conditions of emotional stress, which
increase unnecessarily their inevitable consciousness of inferiority
in an adult world. If the parents do not find out and remedy the cause
of these feelings (which they ought to know are invariably present
whenever a child is naughty) and provide an expression by which the
desired power is gained in a right way, let me warn them that they are
dangerously limiting their children’s chance of a successful and happy
life. By connecting pleasure with bad conduct, they are certainly,
though they do not know it, making the way easy for every kind of
future bad conduct.

The fate of all children is decided in the nursery; criminals are made
there as well as saints and heroes.




THE TYRANNY OF PARENTS


In the life of every girl and every boy there come times when they
must, and should, free themselves from the thraldom of the home.

This may sound hard to parents, who desire almost always to keep their
children in tutelage, and cannot often even think of them except as
belonging to the home and to themselves.

Yet the young must rebel, must escape from this too-closely-binding
yoke of love. They have to break away from the moorings of safety; to
adventure; to find a place for themselves; to get into the world and to
establish their own lives as women and men.

We should hear much less of trouble between parents and children if
fathers, and especially mothers, could be made to understand that the
conflict with their growing boys and girls is not a personal conflict;
that it has nothing, or at least very little, to do with the actual
situation, and is not directly dependent on anything that either the
parents or the children may do or may not do. And this is comforting to
parents—it does not mean that their children love them less.

No, the conflict is based on an inescapable psychological opposition.
It is the necessity of the young to escape from the tyranny of the old.

The parent’s hand is needed to steady the child, while it is unable
to stand firmly on its own feet or to guide its own steps; but as the
child grows older, it must learn to walk alone. If the mother persists
in holding out a hand, never lets the child fall down, she destroys a
proper independence and the hand held-out-too-long is used to satisfy
the mother’s selfish desire; to give her the pleasure she gains from
the child’s dependence on herself, and not because of any need of the
child for help.

You will see the application of this illustration.

Many mothers prolong the years of childish helplessness and absence
of initiative because they do not want their children to grow up.
Especially they check the boy’s or the girl’s independent feelings and
impulses by persistently guiding them.

There is an immense, but usually unrecognised, selfishness in the
apparently devoted parent. Such devotion ignores the right of the young
to discover for themselves.

The separation between parent and child needs to be more than a
mere separation in space. Sending a boy or a girl away to school
or elsewhere does not separate it from the home ties; often such a
separation but serves to bind them more fixedly. What is needed is a
psychological separation—an emotional freedom from the too-crippling
dependence of childhood. There is the need to take the home standards
and compare them with other standards of the world; the getting rid
of the old excessive reverence for the parents. They, too, must be
criticised and judged.

This process of liberation is difficult and very painful to the child;
that is why so often there is rebellion and unkindness. And the danger
is greater because, at this period, the boy or the girl is so easily
discouraged, turns back so readily with kindness to the old safety.
And if this is countenanced by the parents, who continue to offer a
too-protective affection, the character of the boy or the girl is
weakened so that in after years they will not be able to meet the
necessities of adult action.

The too fond mother or father perpetuates the childhood of their sons
and daughters. They are a far more real danger to their children than
neglectful or careless parents.

It is worthwhile considering some of the reasons why parents do too
much for their children; are too careful to keep them bound to the home
and within the protection of parental love.

The parents who have failed in satisfying their own desires see in
their children a new opportunity. They hope for vicarious satisfaction.
And for this reason, rather than for the reasons of unselfish love
which they believe rule their conduct, they will sacrifice themselves
so that their children may achieve what they have failed in gaining.
They are to hand down and maintain _their name_, to keep in the world
_their family_, and all that seems of value _in themselves_—all that
would be lost by their approaching extinction.

If we stop to think, we shall see how common and easy it is for parents
to use their children as instruments of satisfaction. Wherever one
or other parent is unhappy, suffering under some unsatisfied desire,
they seek to satisfy these desires through their children. Do we not
know that the wife, and sometimes also the husband, not happy in their
own marriage concentrate their hopes of a satisfying life on their
children. The mother wants her daughters to be literally, wholly
devoted to her; she loves again in her love for her sons; or the father
compensates himself with his devotion to his daughters, while he seeks
to satisfy his desire for power by completely directing the life of his
sons.

All this is quite wrong. It breaks the power of the young; turns them
into dutiful automatons, instead of rebellious adventurers. Constantly
thwarted, too much protected, they become necessarily less capable of
effort, with a weakened power for action. The model boy or girl of
parents and schoolmasters is almost always a failure in life.

Such parents love their children too selfishly and too possessively.
Seeking emotional relief, they drain for themselves the storehouse of
energy which their children ought to preserve for their own lives.

The danger is deep and far reaching, a too great and unhealthy
attachment to either parent may, and often does, cause an inability to
transfer an adequate share of loyalty and affection from the parent to
the wife or husband. It may check the desire to marry. The man’s choice
of a life partner is guided by an infantile vision of his idealised
mother; and then, after marriage, he will seek from his wife the
feelings of a mother. That is, he will want to be helped and mothered
instead of wishing to guide and protect.

This is a very frequent cause of unhappiness in marriage.

Strange as this may seem, the true Don Juan owes his incapacity to find
satisfaction in love to the fact that he searches unconsciously for
what he can never find, the lost features of his childhood’s mother. He
is unfaithful to all women because he is faithful to one woman.

Again the girl may feel towards her husband as she did towards her
father; she may be too obedient, too uncritical to be a true helpmate;
or, and this is much more serious, a too excessive identification with
the mother may render difficult and even impossible the right response
to love.

It is not too much to say that, wherever there is this over-attachment
and persistence of the childhood attitude, or where the conflict to
break from the too heavy tyranny is very severe, the whole career and
the whole love-history of the adult life is settled and decided—damned
and fated to disaster from the start. Indeed the seed of failure, of
unhappiness, even of crime and vice, often is set in helpless children
by the selfishness and ignorance of over-affectionately helpful
parents, whose too much interference, too emotional solicitude, blocks
the narrow passes that lead on to open and independent life.




THE SUPERFLUOUS FATHER


In many homes, where there are children, the father seems a
stranger—almost an intruder.

The central figure in the family is the mother. All the details of
her life are familiar to the children; she is seen shopping, cooking,
looking after the home. The father is a little mysterious; he goes
adventuring in the unknown world. He is picturesque and wonderful; an
exciting figure that arouses nursery admiration—but he is unnecessary.

At first the mother occupies all the child’s attention. She supplies
food, comfort, shelter, teaching and brings happiness to the nursery.
She is the first love-object and of supreme importance; the starting
point of all those interests of the children which lie outside of
themselves.

But the other parent—the superfluous father, comes both as interrupter
and friend into this mother-child circle. He plays with the children,
opens up new delightful ways of interest, brings the movement that
children love. But also he is a disturber. He absorbs the mother, draws
her attention and care from the children. He upsets the order and
balance of the nursery. He almost dethrones the baby.

Thus at a very early age jealousy of the father begins to stir and
unsettle the nursery peace. Usually we either treat this childish
jealousy as a joke or refuse to admit its presence, but it is deadly
earnest to the child itself. If the mother is capricious, varying
in her attentions to her husband and to her children, or if she is
over-tender and too demonstratively affectionate, this jealousy may,
and indeed, must work great and permanent evil.

You see, it imposes a conflict in the exquisitely responsive child,
between the emotions of hate and anger and envy born of jealousy, and
the emotions of love and admiration and obedience dependent on a sense
of the benefits conferred by the father.

It is the duty of the mother so to balance her favours and her love
that the rights of the husband and the children are both maintained,
and neither side is tempted to be a monopolist.

For it is not only the children who are jealous of the father. Often
the father is jealous of the children. And often he has cause. Some
women, when once the child is born, regard their husbands solely as the
person for providing money necessary for the maintenance of the home.
In any other capacity she has ceased to desire him, frankly he is in
the way.

The mother type often ceases, after motherhood, to be the loving
mate—the wife. There is so little time for love making in a nursery
home. The man becomes a superfluity, his demands tend to be delegated
to holidays that are planned, but do not often occur.

Nature herself seems to condemn the man in his capacity as father. So
delicate is the bond which attaches him to the child as compared with
the unbreakable bindings which hold the child to the mother; so readily
can he be pushed outside the circle of the family, where, as a member
apart, he will inevitably seek his own interests and pleasures.

Now, whether this complete severance happens or not, some conflict
between the father and his children, especially between father and sons
is almost bound to occur. This is a war which is normal and, indeed,
inevitable—far more so than any class-war, any opposition and struggle
between the nations.

Have we not read of the solitary polygamous father of the past, the Old
Man of the Tribe, who drove his sons out of the horde as they grew up,
because in his greed he wanted all the women to be his wives? Much time
has passed since then, but these emotions are very old and very strong.
Pity and the gentler feelings of civilisation enable the father to
accept the son as a member of the family and as a companion instead of
a rival. But echoes remain of the old instincts of jealous rivalry.

No science is so difficult or so important as psychology. It is
because parents do not understand their own minds or the minds of
their children that they make such mistakes. They do not see that some
jealousy and opposition in family relationships are inevitable and,
in fact, useful. Else the child would never grow up, would always be
overwhelmed by its parents.

So do not let us be too alarmed if sons oppose fathers, or if fathers
are wanting in sympathy with their sons.

Yet it must be remembered finally, on the other side, that the
authority of the father has to be maintained. Superfluous in the
family, from one point of thought, his influence is nevertheless of
the most urgent importance. Without it a too great dependence on self
is fostered at too early an age, which sets up an intolerant and
unreasoning hatred of all authority and an inability to suffer any kind
of restraint.

The father thus needs to preserve his rights and duties within the
home. If women have had to fight for the Vote and the open door to the
profession, the father may have to fight for the love of his children
and the key to the nursery.

He must refuse to be regarded as superfluous.




THE PERFECT MOTHER


A few weeks ago a shower of sudden rain brought me for shelter into
the house of a kindly stranger, who beckoned me in from the position I
had taken under the thickly foliaged trees, bordering her garden. She
was a woman who exuded kindness. You know the type—opulent in figure,
wholesome and ripe, her face beaming in wide wrinkles of pink flesh.

The sudden generous smile of the big mouth showed her the possessor
of a real charm. Her eyes had a blue twinkle that attracted laughter.
Quite plainly she would be delightful as a mother. For about her was
something that conjured visions of nursery fires, of warm, sweet
bread-and-milk, of sugar plums after nasty powders, and of kisses
and forgiveness given for childish wrong doing, without any unfair
bargaining for repentence.

But this woman had no child. Nature does not always, in this matter,
act as intelligently as she might. We all know of many Betsy Trotwoods.
On the other hand, we find children lavished wastefully—yes,
children, swarming in the cold homes of mothers who do not want
them—women without understanding of children or any trace of parental
passionateness. Do you not recall many modern prototypes of Mrs.
Jellaby?

I felt my bowels ache for this woman with her rich and wasted
motherhood. Her opulent affections were lavished not, as they should
have been, on the tender warm bodies of little children, but on dogs.

Never have I seen so many dogs: they were placed all over the rather
small room. Both easy chairs were occupied by a canine seater. There
was a mother with new baby-pups in a lined basket before the great
fire. Another dog who was sick was in another basket, wrapped in a
shawl, on the other side of the fire. The room was stifling, and had
a sick, close, doggy smell. And though I am a lover of dogs, I felt
disgusted. I really hated those pampered toys, that snarled and snapped
and grumbled at me in the most horrible way. Believe me, I am not
exaggerating. You could not speak. The whole room was dogs. Enough! Let
us leave them and get on to something of greater value.

It was that thought which caught and gripped my attention. This woman’s
unfilled life. I could not forget it: it stayed with me long after I
had left the house—a memory not to be obliterated.

She was forlorn among her dogs. It was a tragedy of waste. I have had
so many dreams of the perfect mother that I was stung to anger and
impatience to find her, at last here, squandering her affections on a
canine brood.

The situation was so plain. This woman needed children, if not of
her flesh, then adopted and made her own by the rich fullness of her
motherhood.




NOBODY’S CHILDREN

CHILD ADOPTION: A MUCH NEEDED REFORM


It was a short time after I had found “the perfect mother” thus wasted,
that there came into my hands the “White Paper” which gives in full the
wise and interesting Report of the Committee on Child Adoption. I knew
that here was just the very thing that was wanted. Here was shewn the
means by which the motherly childless woman and the motherless child
could be brought together.

The desire for child adoption has never been stronger than it is at the
present time. But I do not hesitate to say that, in the present absence
of any law to regulate and safeguard adoption, the position is so set
about with difficulties and so pressed with continuous dangers that
the practice ought to be actively discouraged. It is dangerous for the
adopter and, what matters even more, it is dangerous for the child.

The emphatic and unanimous decision of the Committee was that there
is immediate necessity for a change in the law to make the adoption
of children legal in this country. Every one who gave evidence was
unanimously in favour of adoption in all cases where, for one reason
or another, any child could not have the care of its own parents. It
is much better for every child to be brought up in a home than in an
institution. Not only is it cheaper, but the child benefits far more.
But adoption needs to be regulated and legalised. The child is too
precious a possession to leave to anyone to do with as they desire.

The report recommends:—

  1. That after obtaining the consent of the real parents and the
     adopting parents, as well as the consent of the child, if he
     (or she) is over fourteen, all adoption shall be sanctioned by
     a judicial authority.


  2. That confidential official inquiries shall be made from time to
     time, as to the child’s progress and happiness in the adopted home.

  3. That the child shall take the adopter’s name, and shall have, as
     far as is possible, the position of a natural child.

This Report was presented in June, 1921. Yet nothing has been done. And
what I wish to emphasize with all the power that I have, is the crime
of this delay and the urgent need there is for immediate legislation.
Children are waiting to be adopted; childless people are waiting to
adopt. Surely it ought not to be difficult to frame a simple law that
would safeguard the interests of both.

There is little wonder that hitherto adoption has not been popular in
this country. One strong reason that has prevented the far-sighted
from attempting it is that in England there is no legal method by
which adoption can be carried out. And because of this there is, as I
have said, too much danger connected with it, as well as not enough
certainty of its continuance. For the law grants the foster-parent no
recognised control over the child.

There is the ever present fear, increasing as the years pass and the
child grows up, lest the natural parent shall come one day and claim
the right to take the child away—an injustice specially likely to
happen as the child becomes older and is able to earn money.

Then there is, on the other side, the possibility (often realised) of
the adoption being a commercial transaction between the parent (most
frequently an unmarried mother) and a foster-parent, by which the
latter receives a sum of money and takes over an unwanted child, who
most frequently dies. It is horrible to contemplate.

But indeed, always, there is the dangerous position of the
adopted child, who has no settled position, no legal claim on the
foster-parents, who may adopt a child in the most solemn manner and
keep it all through the attractive years of childhood, then, when
the less attractive years of adolescence begin, or when any change
in circumstances makes the adopted child no longer wanted, they can
calmly withdraw their protection and turn the child out of their home.
Again, I say, it is horrible to contemplate. The destiny of the adopted
child is controlled throughout the unprotected years of childhood and
of youth by the whim and caprice, both of the natural parent and the
adopted-parent.

And do not comfort yourself by believing that these are merely
imaginary troubles. They occur every day as every one knows who has
any knowledge of the practice and results of child adoption in this
country. I personally know of many cases of injustice that have brought
disaster and unhappiness to the child. Let me tell you one. A boy
was adopted by a man, unmarried, a minister of God, who was a social
worker and greatly attached to children. But later in his life the man
married. Under pressure from his mother, accounted as a religious and
good woman, the adoption was cancelled, the boy, wanted no longer, was
sent to a home for homeless children. No one troubled about him. Or
take another case where an illegitimately born child—a baby girl, was
abandoned and afterwards reclaimed _three times during the first five
years of her life_! Each time the mother took her away from a happy
home with foster-parents who loved and cared well for her. Then after a
few months of neglect the mother again abandoned her. They had no legal
remedy against the caprice of the mother.

These unguarded children belong to nobody. Here is an amazing gap
in our law. It is worse than that—it is an amazing gap in our
consciousness and sense of social responsibility. “Nobody’s children!”
the phrase has a pitiable and stinging significance. Yet it is just
this state of things we are countenancing with our lazy and callous
indifference. There are tens of thousands of little ones for whom
to-day it is bitter truth that they belong to no one. Orphaned, or
unwanted by their natural-parents, many of them are being adopted in
the worst and most casual manner—handed out “on probation” like a cat
or a dog.

And if you doubt the truth of this statement, listen to the judgment of
the Committee on Child Adoption as to the disgraceful carelessness with
which adoption is being carried on in this country;

  “We believe that the absence of proper control over the ‘adoption’ of
  children over seven years of age and under that age unless payment
  is made, results _in an undesirable traffic in child life with
  which no one can interfere_, unless proceedings are taken against
  the adopting parent for cruelty or neglect; children may be handed
  from one person to another, with or without payment, advertised
  for disposal, and even sent out of the country without any record
  being kept. _Intermediaries may accept children for ‘adoption’ and
  dispose of them as and when they choose._ Homes and institutions for
  the reception of the children exist which are not subject to any
  inspection.” (Paragraph 61, page 10 of the Report.)

The italics in this passage are mine; will you try to think what these
conditions, _which you are permitting_, mean? Think of them with
your hearts, not with your heads! And if you have a child of your
own, passionately dear to your life, try to realise the abominable
position—the cruelty that can hardly be escaped, as if it were _your
child_, who was thus being handed callously from one person to another,
without protection, without any form of legal guardianship.

We talk much of the nation’s care for children. Would it not then seem
a necessary step to have some just provision of our law to protect the
helpless unwanted child, who at present belongs to nobody? Humanity,
and even good sense answers, “Yes.” The Common Law of England has
hitherto always said most emphatically, “No.” _Except for a reference
to adoptions which has managed to slip into a marginal note of a
Finance Act, there is no recognition of adoption in our laws._

The right thing to do is the simple thing. We have on the one hand,
these homeless children, whose numbers have become much larger in these
last years and with the change and slackening in responsible conduct,
while on the other hand, we have, an increased number of women who
are childless and will never be able to marry. The problem, at its
simplest, is this: What can be done to bring together the childless
woman with a mother’s nature and the motherless child?

I am not forgetting the Institutions that are already in existence.
There are two agencies for arranging adoption, as well as other
religious and social societies, and many homes, from which children can
be adopted. These agencies are doing admirable work, but they cannot
do a tenth part of what ought to be done. And the very worst cases, in
which the child most urgently needs protection, often cannot be reached
at all. This problem is too big to be muddled through privately. It is
the concern of the whole nation.

_The first necessary step is to legalise adoption. Until that is done,
nothing can be done._

At present as I have told you, the position is one of very great
danger. The law grants the foster-parents no recognised legal control
over the child. The mother, or her relatives, unless obviously immoral
and unfit persons, may at any time claim back the child.

Even in the most favourable circumstances there is danger, and a
never-ending uncertainty that cuts at the very root of the adopted
relationships. I repeat: neither the foster-parent or the child has
any security. And at any time, and for any reason, the child may be
taken from his home. Directly he (or she) grows up and is able to earn
money, the needy relatives, with an eye on those small earnings or on
the much larger sums squeezable from the foster-parents, may prove an
ever-threatening nuisance. If the foster-parent acts boldly and resists
such claim, the relative may apply for a writ of Habeas Corpus in
the High Court, when (under the Custody of the Children’s Act, 1891)
the case is decided at the discretion of the Court. As a rule, the
interests of the child are considered, and, in this respect, matters
have much improved of late years. But even if the decision is given in
favour of the foster-parents so that the child remains in the home in
which it has been reared and is loved, there is a period of ceaseless
anxiety; and, that the decision will be favourable is certain only when
the character of the claiming relative can be proved to be bad.

_So curious is the law that it is safer to adopt the child of bad or
doubtful parentage (where this can be proved) than the child of good
and respectable people._

The other side of the position has also to be considered. As is
evident, the foster-parents may be bad. This we have seen. And what I
want to emphasise further is that here too the danger threatens the
unprotected child. Just as the law gives no recognised protection to
the good foster-parents, so it affords no protection to the child
against a bad foster-parent.

All the time I am trying to drive into your consciousness the terrible
position of the child that has no legal claims; no kind of safeguard.
He (or, of course, she, and the girl babies are adopted much oftener
than boys) may be adopted simply as playthings, or to satisfy deeply
unconscious instincts of cruelty, or as an investment for the time when
they can earn money. Also they can be cast off at the caprice of their
adopters.

A further and permanent injustice, operative even under happy
conditions and in a good home, arises from the fact that the adopted
child is without rights of inheritance. If his foster parents, however
rich, die intestate, he has no share in the family property. At any
time in his life he may be left penniless and friendless, without
recognition that he belongs to anyone.

Such uncertainty is awful. Try to realise the suffering which it must
bring to the child, ever dogging his footsteps like a menacing shadow.

Our sluggard imaginations must surely be stirred now our attention has
been directed to this gap in our law. I wish that my pen had greater
power to bring home to everyone concerned—and _everyone who cares
or professes to care for the welfare of children is concerned_—the
iniquity of allowing the continuance of conditions that must bring
nothing less than tragedy into the lives of these unfortunate and
unprotected little ones.

This is almost the only country which does not recognise and legalise
adoption: all that needs to be done is to bring our law up to the
standard which prevails in other lands. We alone are neglectful. It
is one of the many social matters concerning children on which Great
Britain has seriously fallen behind the example of its own daughter
States. The United States, Australia and New Zealand have all gone
far ahead of the Mother Country in their legislation in regard to
child adoption. All the forty-eight States of the Union have now Acts
regulating adoption. But perhaps the Model Act is that of Western
Australia, passed in 1891. It provides for the complete and careful
guardianship of all adopted children. The Act has worked admirably,
and with a very few alterations could be adopted to the needs of this
country.

And it must not be thought that all this recognition and protection
of adoption is a new thing, and, as such, possible to dismiss as
unnecessary, belonging to an over-protective and grandmotherly
system of law. Such a belief would be far from the truth. Students
of history know how almost universal was the practice of adoption in
older civilisations. Roman law recognised the custom and adoption
was extremely common. I could give many other examples. Especially
interesting is the custom in India, where among the Hindoos, when a
child is adopted into a new family, it goes through the religious
ceremonies belonging to death before quitting the home in which it was
born, and afterwards goes through the religious ceremonies belonging to
birth on reaching the new home. The old bond is completely severed and
a new social, religious and legal bond created.

I would ask your attention to this wise provision made by one of the
oldest civilisations, which often understood so much more practically
and simply the needs of a social situation.

If the full necessary security is to be given to the practice of
adoption there must clearly be a complete passing over of the duties
and rights of the natural-parents to the adopting parents. Adoption
ought to be undertaken only solemnly and with due understanding of all
the difficulties, and the necessary precautions. The closest enquiries,
in every case, need to be made as to the bona fide intentions and
complete suitability of the adopting parents: guarantees must be given
of their intentions and ability to bring up and care for the child.
It would also be equally necessary, except in exceptional cases of
proved cruelty and unfit parentage, to ascertain the reasons why the
parents—or parent in the case of an illegitimately born child—desired
to give up their rights of guardianship. But when once this has been
done, and any order of adoption made, the parental relationship ought
to be transferred completely from the natural to the adopting parents.

And in the interests of the child, I would have this transference
carried out with the severest restrictions. I would not allow a parent,
or parents, who once gave up the guardianship of the child any rights
of visitation. Such visits, even under the happiest circumstances cause
disturbance, remind the child unceasingly of its difficult position
as an adopted child. They tend to create confusion, with feelings of
dissatisfaction and jealousy; comparison between the old home and the
new home; conflicts between the affection for the adopted-parents
and the very possible drawing back of natural affection for the
real parents.

All ways adoption must be difficult.

Science has shewn us how terribly the future of the child depends on
its early relationships in the home; its relation to its mother, on
whom it depends for the first childish satisfactions, its relations
to its father, to its brothers and sisters. The adopted relationships
can never be quite the same as the natural relationships. We now know
how easily jealousy and unhappiness can arise in the heart of even the
youngest child, and what havoc to the after life these feelings may
bring. If we remember this, we shall realise better the disturbing
emotions likely to be aroused when one parent is lost and replaced by
another. That is why everything possible needs to be done to give to
adopted parenthood the strongest stability. The adoption of a child
ought never to be undertaken lightly. It is, perhaps, the most binding
and the most solemn, and the most fatefully responsible of any human
relationship.

A righteous law of adoption needs to guard the adopted child so that
the voluntary relationship is as binding in every way and as permanent
as the natural relationship. For this reason the adopted child should,
in my opinion, have the same rights of inheritance as all other
children. Nothing short of this can do justice to the adopted child.

We talk a great deal to-day about children and their rights, but
very few of us realise at all practically and fully the change
of attitude, in particular in connection with property and the
rights of inheritances, that are likely to be necessary, if, in all
circumstances, our theories are to be expressed in our daily conduct.

The whole question is complicated and very difficult, there is, indeed,
no easy way out.




LET US PENSION THE MOTHERS.


I was attending a conference to consider the best steps to be taken
to aid mothers and to stop the sacrifice of the lives and health of
little children. All kinds of suggestions were made. We talked much, we
proposed and discussed, but none of us seemed able to agree what ought
to be done.

Then a strong man, an observant lawyer, rose. He spoke with the biting
American twang. His words were few: “Why don’t you pay poor mothers?”

The brilliant simplicity of this question stirred at once our powers of
understanding.

It was Judge Neil who spoke. In brief phrases he told us what had been
done in America. Mother’s pensions, which are in reality children’s
pensions, have been established in most of the forty-eight States of
the Union. They are granted until the children are fourteen, or, in the
case of delicate children, until sixteen. State-appointed supervisors
watch over the welfare of the children to ensure that the money given
is well spent by the mother.

As Judge Neil placed the facts before us, this plan of paying mothers
instead of forcing them to go out as workers, possibly at “sweated”
wages, and then paying other people in an institution to do their work,
seemed so simple that I was filled with wonder that we had not long ago
thought of so easy and obvious a reform. It is strange that it is so
often the most simple things that we never think of doing. I believe it
is because we think of reforms intellectually; we are not human enough
to feel.

Now, it is just Judge Neil’s humanity that set his feet upon the right
way. Listen to the story of how first he came to think of mother’s
pensions:—

In 1911, a poor widow, broken by the burden of supporting her family,
was condemned to have all her five children taken from her.

“Better to shoot her than take away her children.” said Judge Neil. He
then asked how much it would cost to maintain the children in a State
institution.

“The country pays the institution 10 dollars a month for each child,”
was the answer.

“Why not give the 10 dollars to the mother and let her keep her
children?”

Such was Judge Neil’s humane and practical solution of the problem.
Thus the scheme for pensioning mothers was born.

The responsibility of the State for children ill-cared-for is admitted
in most countries. It is, therefore, a question of ways and means, not
a question of high principle, how best to carry out this intention and
prevent child poverty.

Surely grants to good mothers are better than grants to institutions.
Even the best Poor Law schools must have the faults that are inherent
in institutions.

I can hardly express too strongly my own want of faith in “expert
child-trainers.” I have found always that they regard the child mainly,
if not entirely, as something to be improved and instructed on a
definite plan. The “expert” is never human, and a child has need of all
the human treatment it can get.

Every child has absolute need of its mother. All experience shows us
that the home, with its sympathetic relationships of mother and child,
sisters and brothers, cannot be replaced. We must insist on reforms
that will make home life possible.

The child has to accept the arrangements we make; that is why this
question is of such immense importance. If the matter could be fixed by
the will of the children I should have no fear. The child has not lost
the true values of life.

There is another fact to consider—one that will appeal to ratepayers.
Grants to mothers are cheaper than grants to institutions. In the
United States the payment made to a mother works out at about one-third
the cost of maintaining a child in an institution. So we can do the
best thing for the child and its mother and at the same time save our
pockets.




BOY AND GIRL OFFENDERS, AND ADULT MISUNDERSTANDING


Much disturbing evidence on such a grave question as the bad behaviour
and consequent punishment of boys and girls, in institutions, and in
prisons, is made public, from time to time, to rouse the consciousness
of all those who have concern for the welfare of the young. Sometimes
the events recorded are of a more serious character. The attempted
suicides and continued escapes of young prisoners certainly afford a
rather tragic witness of some failure in our reformative efforts. Even
under the Borstal system of prison life—a system that is primarily
intended to be humane and educative, and not brutal and primitive, the
results obtained are far from being satisfactory. We cannot feel that
we are achieving anything like what ought to be done in the difficult,
but necessary, duty of reclaiming these young lives that, for one cause
or another, have fallen to disaster.

If we believe, as believe we must, that the old are responsible for the
young—that the one generation must stand as guardian to the next—this
problem of delinquency is one that we may not thrust aside. It is
bigger than its immediate application in connection with reclaiming the
individual boy or the individual girl: it touches the very deepest of
our duties—our duty to the future. It is for us to ask many questions
of ourselves, and of all those who are in any way connected with the
young; questions to which it is not easy always to find satisfactory
answers.

It is obvious that something is wrong.

I do not wish to harrow you with painful statistics, or by reminding
you of unfortunate incidents in connection with young prisoners that
_you ought not to have forgotten. You would not have forgotten if you
had cared as you ought to care._

I do not deny that “much is being done; that conditions are better
far than they were in the past.” But this does not cover our failures
or lessen our responsibilities. I plead for greater attention to, and
more understanding of, the delinquent child. It is not, and never can
be, a question that can be fixed or finally decided: the child is an
individual; and, in each case, the problem of dealing with him must be
a separate problem. This is certain—only by understanding the child
who fails, _his own difficulties and his own failure_—can we advance.
By this way only can we give aid to these young offenders, who, with
a burden of ancient instincts and uncontrolled impulses, come into
a world filled with undesirable examples, where they have to face
manifold temptations.

Let us try, then, to consider the delinquent boy and girl, bearing
these truths in our thoughts. And first we must acknowledge the
complexity and terrible difficulty of the problem. Delinquency in
the young cannot be explained by obvious superficial causes. The
motivating impulse to naughtiness and bad conduct always lies outside
of consciousness. I mean that the boy or girl who continuously does
wrong, fails altogether in good conduct, whether in a reformatory, in
a prison, or a Borstal institution is acting in this way from a reason
which is deeply hidden, and which they do not themselves understand;
while further, the present misbehaviour is connected with some
experience of the past that now they have forgotten. _They are driven
by this inward urge into rebellion and insubordinate conduct._ And the
help they ought to have is one of re-education, by clearing up what was
wrong in the past, and this help must be given to them by those who are
specially trained to understand.

They cannot, unaided, help themselves. The things they do wrong—the
breaking of rules, the failures in work, the violent conduct, the
attempted escapes—in the vast majority of cases, are a defence against
unhappiness that stalks as a deadly shadow, following their young lives.

_Their treatment is a medical as well as a social and ethical problem.
The young do wrong because their souls are sick._ Such a statement
is not fantastic, it is seriously true. To understand the meaning of
the present bad conduct of anyone, but especially of the delinquent
boy or girl, it is absolutely necessary to find out the motive which
makes them want to behave badly. Always we have to search to find “a
reason why.” To discover, as far as we are able, what it is causing the
rebellion or the bad conduct, we must have wisdom to give up the old
ignorant ideas as to its being possible to cure bad conduct, in any
way that matters, by scoldings, by punishments or, indeed, any kind of
direct attack.

The fault that distresses those in authority in the present must be
regarded as the sign of a hidden conflict that has distressed the child
in the past. It is this conflict, then, that must be discovered and
dealt with. Never in any case can the lazy adult view be accepted that
the delinquent child does wrong because of original sin.

The young do wrong when they suffer, usually through the blunders of
those who are supposed to train them; their faults in behaviour are a
relief for pain they find too intolerable to bear. If the boy or girl
is happy in harmony with his or her world, then that boy or girl is
good.

To find the real cure for this unhappiness of soul is, of course, a
most difficult task. It can be accomplished completely only by those
specially trained in understanding and analysing the child mind. But
much good, and a return to healthy happiness can often be gained, by a
little helpful understanding of the special problems of the individual
boy or girl. It is the educator’s duty to try to pour daylight on the
hidden plague spots of the soul.

This can never be done by cruelty or any form of coercive treatment
which arouses fear—the most deadly enemy to right conduct. The way to
educate the abnormal, the difficult boy or girl, is not to be shocked
or to punish them, but to show them sympathy, directed by knowledge.

Teach these girls and boys that they have failed in good conduct, not
because they are bad or different really from other more fortunate
young people, but because they have been unhappy—ill with feelings of
insecurity, of deficiency, of loneliness, of failure; help them to
understand the causes that have brought about this condition, why they
have felt inferior, been unhappy; and then build up their characters
by giving them new opportunities of finding happiness in their work
and in their play, providing new interests and creating opportunities
for new responsibilities. These young people want kindness and to be
taught to be sociable. Moral conduct is never easy. We all want what we
do want. We surrender our wishes only because we find we satisfy other
desires by so doing. We are praised and rewarded for good conduct and
for preferring to give up to others what we want to do ourselves. And a
very practical lesson in our training of delinquents depends upon this.
The educators must take the greatest possible care that bad conduct
does not give greater pleasure than good conduct. Doing wrong so often
opens for the young the widest and easiest door to gain excitement. If
boys and girls in Borstal institutions and in reformatories are left
unnoticed and never praised when good they quickly feel neglected.
And though they do not recognise these disappointed feelings they act
very strongly in setting them to seek for some kind of relief. And if
allowed to enjoy power when they become rebellious, through the notice
that is bestowed upon them and the upsetting of the usual regime of the
school or the prison workshop, they will continue to indulge in bad
conduct whenever they are bored or, for any reason, crave some form of
emotional relief.

Bad conduct is primitive, infantile conduct, and one of its strongest
characteristics is the tendency to proceed more directly, more
unthinkingly, and more selfishly to the goal of the wishes than is
usually done by the reasonable adult.

The little child wants something, grabs at it, and when it does not at
once get it, screams and breaks into a passion.

Now this is just what is done by the delinquent boy or girl, whose
conduct must be regarded as infantile, frankly selfish, and regulated
only by doing what one wants and getting what one wants. Such conduct
points to a condition of retarded growth; and usually can be traced
back to some mistake in the early training, which has prevented an
adaptation of the character to grown-up conditions, so that the boy or
girl of seventeen or eighteen acts still like the young child of four
or five years of age.

Every child, who is to grow into a successful and happy adult, has to
grow out of this primitive behaviour and to learn social standards
of conduct—to think what other people want and to measure their own
conduct in its relation to others.

Thus the real problem of the education of the delinquent boy or girl
is to help them to grow up. And the very first step is to teach them
to stop thinking about themselves. They have to learn to turn outwards
towards others and away from their own wishes and hidden desires, that
are the real cause of their unhappiness and bad conduct.

And for this reason, even if for no other, there could be no possible
form of treatment as harmful, and also I may add so silly, as that
adopted (as still so often it is) in reformatory institutions of
placing insubordinate prisoners in solitary confinement, even sometimes
with the use of irons. No other form of punishment could be more
disastrous to a boy or girl. To permit this cruelty is assuredly to
increase the faults of character that are the cause of the bad conduct.
By such insane punishment the young offenders are separated from their
companions, perhaps bound, and left without occupation to sit alone,
brooding over their unhappiness; their thoughts necessarily fixed upon
themselves. They cannot fail by means of this unhealthy process to be
sent more backwards into childish and bad behaviour—driven further away
from adult and social conduct.

Few of us, I think, understand sufficiently how continuous and almost
unspeakably hard, are the efforts that the delinquent has to make in
order to achieve re-education. He is overwhelmingly conscious (however
much he may seem to be indifferent) of his own inferiority. All such
boys or girls, who frequently become aggressive and insubordinate,
need to be treated in such a way as will increase their confidence
in themselves. This may seem contradictory, but it is true. If the
young offenders are punished and discouraged the trouble from which
they suffer is sure to increase by making stronger the sense of
self-depreciation. Too often the devastating feelings are driven back
into the obscure places of the mind—the unseen office of the directing
forces that in secret issue the supreme commands that control conduct.
It is in order the better to overcome the truths that would stab him
about himself if he recognised them, that such a wrong-doer becomes
aggressively self-assertive, indulges in foolish acts and marked
insubordination. Such boys and girls are without courage, and all their
pride boils up behind a maimed and timid character.

The important thing to remember is that, though bad conduct comes from
what seems insubordination, “the characteristics of bad conduct” arise
from the state of the boy’s or girl’s mind, and that state depends very
much on the treatment he (or she) receives.

If you cure the particular fault for which the punishment was
inflicted, and the boy or girl loses his (or her) soul, you have done
more harm than good. But the real position is worse than that, for
if you hurt the young soul, you give up for ever the opportunity of
re-educating the boy or girl for good conduct.




NEW WAYS OF TEACHING CHILDREN

UNBOUNDED FREEDOM AND SOME DRAWBACKS


I remember once seeing in “Punch” a picture that has always retained
in my memory the vividness of the first impression. It is a long time
ago, yet I can see it now exactly as I saw it then. A father, at a
children’s Christmas party, was personating a bear. Filled with the
adult’s joy of being allowed to be a child, he was roaring loudly, as
he crawled upon the floor covered with a woolly hearth-rug. So much for
the father. Certainly he was enjoying it. But what about the children.
What was their view of this performance?

They were all looking bored. Even the tiny ones shewed no enthusiasm.
In the corner of the room as far withdraw as space permitted was a
group of young school boys, very stiffly correct in Etons and immense
white collars. They were disgusted. One, who had ostentatiously turned
his back on the performing father, was plainly angry. Even his back
was eloquent of disapproval and gloom surrounded him. His companion,
standing next to him, attempted to cheer him in this way: “Never mind,
Brown major, you know its not _your_ fault if your pater is a blooming
fool!”

It is, indeed, a different aspect of the situation. The son ashamed of
the father! The young generation condemning the old! It is fitting that
we should take notice and remember the lesson that is taught.

For this picture of appraising youth carries a very real moral that
should be considered by those modern educational enthusiasts, who are
always talking about amusing the child—as if that were the one thing
which mattered. There is no subject, I believe, on which greater
nonsense is talked than on this one of interesting children. Personally
I am sceptical whether children are ever greatly interested in the
entertainments that the adult provides for their amusement. What they
find interesting are the things they provide for themselves. That is
one reason why there must be so great an element of falsity in modern
educational theories, which aim at making lessons so interesting that
they become like play.

It cannot be done.

Much of this kind of talk sounds admirable from the point of view of
the adult, but what I always want to know is the view taken by the
child—by the boy or the girl. I do not think they are quite _so fond
of being amused_ as we are apt to believe. Nor do I think they can
be, or indeed, ought to be, _interested_ (which is the same really as
being amused) _to adult orders_. I _mean_ that to be truly effective
and liberating to the child, this interest must be dependent on what he
has to do for himself. The work cannot be done for him. That is why I
am afraid of the incursion into the schoolroom of the too anxious and
amusement-providing spirit of the home. It causes too much indirect
interference. It supplies too many appliances. It is over-occupied with
arrangements and the smoothing away of difficulties. In a word it does
not leave the child sufficiently to himself to learn his own lessons,
to satisfy his own needs in his own way.

_It proposes, of course, to do this, but it is just here that enormous
mistakes occur._

I can fancy a group of boys and girls who, if they said what they
really felt about their own education and our ceaseless experiments and
efforts to make their lessons interesting and more acceptable to them,
would pity us as fools.

The point of view of the child (also of the boy and the girl, but
especially, I think, of the boy) is always so utterly different from
the point of view of the adult. You see they are judging the situation
personally, while we are judging it vicariously and ethically.

The ever-pressing idea of the educationalist to-day is to give the
child freedom. But what is freedom? That is a question to which we
have not yet found an answer. Do we consider sufficiently, if what
means freedom to us, really gives freedom to the young? And a second
question—Are we not, perhaps, in our nervous over-anxiety, imposing
upon them something they do not want?

There is a great deal said about self-development and the necessity of
the teacher respecting the child’s individuality. We are continually
hearing of interesting experiments made in free schools and are told of
children who, even when quite young, if left to choose their own tasks,
will be so interested in writing, in reading, and also in arithmetic,
that they will not want to give up their work even when school-hours
are over!

Still I am unconvinced. I would rather have the boy or the girl waiting
in eagerness for the bell to ring to free them from the school.

We are apt to over-estimate our grown-up power. We do this because we
like to do it. It flatters adult egotism. We find a delicious sense of
power in realising ourselves in so many new ways as potters to mould
the clay of the child’s mind. I often feel that we worry about this
question of education much more to please ourselves than to help the
young.

But this continuous occupation with the child is bad for the child,
however gratifying it is to ourselves. By the provision of too many
appliances and “helps to learn,” and by continual experiments that are
too often changed, we tend to check creative originality, and thereby
we destroy the interest we are labouring to stimulate. It is better
for the child if we are less occupied with his needs. If we do not
provide him with interests he will find them for himself. In this case
they will mean more to him—do more for him. I dislike exceedingly all
contrivances that make things easy. I believe the child dislikes them
too. That is one reason why he tires so soon of all the appliances
you provide. They do not stimulate interest and effort, except quite
temporarily, indeed, they destroy both.

This applies to children’s play quite as much as to their schoolwork.
Most children to-day are given too many and too elaborate toys. Perhaps
nothing is more mentally destructive. The child will invent his own
amusements. He wants to fight giant lamp-posts and to go to sea in an
inverted table. To fasten his imagination to your adult suggestions is
to destroy his vigour.

Know then this truth. You can teach the child lessons and you can
discipline him by your grown up authority, _but you cannot by your
ready-made devices successfully interest him or give him freedom_.
That he must find for himself. He cannot develop fully and be reliant,
unless by himself, and very often _against your will_, he travels on
his own road.

There is the very greatest delusion about this idea of freedom in the
school room. And it is open to question whether the children in the
free school, left mainly to choose their own tasks and take their own
time in performing them, are really freer, in any true sense, than the
disciplined and directed children in the master-ruled schools who have,
in my experience, much better opportunities in the out-of-school hours
of developing personality. The discipline of the school does help them
by giving them more rest. I think they are less influenced by their
teacher. For always there is, and must be, whatever the educational
plan and however free from apparent compulsions, behind the pupil the
will of the teacher indirectly, if not directly, guiding. And I am not
sure if this indirect coercion of suggestion is not worse, from the
point of view of the child, than the old-fashioned methods of direct
command. I will even go further and state my belief that its claims are
heavier, and bind the boy or girl more permanently in the prison of
obedience.

For one thing, such indirect coercion does close for the pupils the
splendid liberating door of being rebellious.

I can still remember the excitement and real health-giving joy I
obtained when, as a child, I once out-witted my instructor and escaped
from my lessons, which I heartily detested, to go to a fair we had all
been forbidden to visit. There was a glorious fat woman, and a man who
swallowed swords! Wonderful! And there was a delicious sweet in a long
roll of twisted pink and white, with inside a picture of Roger, the
Claimant. It was the time of the Tichbourne trial. If you could find
one tiny piece of the sweet without the picture, a whole immense bar,
much bigger than those which were ordinarily sold, was to be forfeited
and given to you free! Think of it! The possibility! The excitement!
Every penny I had was spent—and it was worth it! Yes, a thousand times
worth it! Of course, what I did brought punishment. For I had to
confess my misdeeds. Those sweets made me very sick. What did that
matter? I did gain the joy and liberty I was seeking. This was one of
the really educating experiences of my childhood.

Seriously, I am deeply afraid that to-day in our very eagerness to help
children, we may often be acting in an exactly opposite direction as a
hinderance to their self-development, and future happiness. I believe
we are trying to achieve something that is impossible.

One thing I am certain we ought to accept. It is the inescapable
barrier between the generations—between the parents and the children,
the teachers and the pupils. The young ought to be separated from the
old. I think this biological fact is forgotten by many advocates of
freedom and new ideals in education.

I believe also that the young want—and by “want” I mean both desire and
need—the direction of the old. They want the authority that marks the
division between the two generations, for this opens up opportunities
to rebel. Instinctively they know they can find more liberty under
authority, than when left with the pressing burden, often too heavy for
their young inexperience, of deciding at school, as well as at home,
almost everything for themselves.

Nor do I very much believe in the over-worrying conscientiousness of
the modern teachers. Again I must insist upon this. The increasing
pre-occupation with the child; the constant trying of different
educational experiments, is almost certain to exercise an adverse
influence. There may be a tyranny of solicitude and kindness that is
harder to bear than scoldings and punishments. To me there is something
mournful in this chorus of uncertainty, in which it is not difficult
to detect the poverty of our faith. It tells a tale of infirmity both
of life and purpose. So small a thing staggers us. We are without
confidence in ourselves or in life. Why is this?

Do we, I often ask myself, know at all, what the child wants to find
the freedom that gives liberty to the young soul—the only freedom that
matters? How can we give the gifts of life unless we have ourselves
firmer confidence? If anything can destroy the soul of a child, it is
want of security. Our irresolution is our great danger. That is why so
often our efforts are barren. It is a sign of a nervous disorder of the
soul. We seek to gain from outside things what we should find within
ourselves. And the child must suffer. For the child is so helplessly
dependent, so inarticulate, so unable to express his own feelings and
deeper needs.

There is still the most amazing blindness in regard to the effect of
adult conduct on the child. I know of one small boy who was taught in
a free school, where the idea of authority was held in abhorrence.
Yet this boy of eight was found one night sobbing bitterly. His
mother questioned him. It appeared he had been idle at school, rude,
and generally naughty. He had not been scolded, and, of course, not
punished. He had been reasoned with and told the foolishness of
behaving in this way. Apparently all ought to have been well. Yet it
was just in this reasonable gentleness of his headmaster that his
trouble rested. He knew he had been naughty. He _wanted_ the punishment
that would have wiped out his own consciousness of wrong doing. He
sobbed out his complaint to his mother, “if only he (his teacher) had
punished me or been cross and nasty I could have forgotten. It would
have been all over. But now I keep on thinking about it, and I feel
_all twisted up inside_.”

Now this young boy understood his own needs much better than did his
master, who was making the very common mistake of judging the child by
himself. The needs of the child are entirely different from the needs
of the adult. The child wants security, he wants firmness, he desires
authority, he even wants punishment.

Let me tell you another story to help to bring home these forgotten
truths. This time it was a little girl of the tender age of six years,
who had done wrong, was rude and very unkind to her governess. The
occasion was a birthday party. Over-excitement was the outside cause
of her bad behaviour. No one minded the rude remarks except the child
herself. We all, including the insulted governess, understood the
reason. Our mistake was, we understood too well, or rather, we judged
from the outside and from our grown-up point of view, forgetting that
it was not that of the child. We all tried to comfort the little one’s
distress, assuring her we understood and knew she did not mean what she
had said. In vain. The child would not be comforted. I can never forget
the fatalism of her remark, “It does not matter that Miss —— and all of
you forgive me, what matters is that I _did_ it.”

Again it was the child, not we—the grown-ups, who understood the
situation as it really was. And what I want to impress upon you, is
the suffering unwittingly imposed on both these children. If they
had been punished they would not have felt this paralysing sense of
wrong doing—a suffering of the soul, fitting perhaps for the adult,
but not for the child. With punishment or even with scolding, the
penalty would have been paid, and the relief would have been gained of
self-forgiveness—a relief so much more necessary to happiness than the
forgiveness of others.

Of course, it may be argued that morally such self-accusation which
does follow from this method of adult forgiveness, with its sentimental
treatment of wrong doing, is good for children. I do not think so.
Certainly it makes them suffer—suffer intolerably and to an extent
that few adults are sufficiently discerning to realise. But the burden
placed on the untried, unhardened and sensitive child-soul is, I am
certain, too heavy for them to bear safely at this stage of their
psychic growth. Punishment would, in almost all cases, be far easier
and more acceptable. It would also be far healthier. There is always
the gravest danger in placing the immature child in any position that
forces an emotional response in advance of the stage of development
which has been reached. We have to see these problems as the child
feels them, not as we think about them with our grown-up experience and
adult deadness.




DIFFICULTIES AND MISTAKES IN SEX EDUCATION


To the theoretical teacher or parent eager to reform the world on
paper, it may seem easy to introduce sex education into the nursery
training of the home, and into the curriculum of our schools. It
appears a comparatively easy matter to tell the little child the truth
about its own body, and as it grows older, to give carefully prepared
lessons about plants and animals, which shall lead it slowly and
beautifully into the way of knowledge.

Text books have been written, pamphlets officially issued, schemes
drawn up for home and school instruction, and rules laid down—new
finger-posts to right conduct, whereby the younger generation may
be enlightened and (as we hope) by this means saved from making the
mistakes that we ourselves have made.

I wish it were as simple as this. That sex instruction could be taken
from books.

Of late various attempts have been made to focus attention on this
aspect of the question or on that; we have been told how this teaching
should be given, and with still greater assurance how it should not
be given; this must be done and that must not be done; this said and
that left unsaid. And groups of earnest-minded parents and teachers, in
almost every town, have met together to discuss and decide debatable
points; lecturers have been applied for, and their utterances have
been listened to as a new gospel; yet I venture to think that, as in
all other experimental and debatable questions, the very multitude of
counsel and the earnestness that is expended, indicates the uncertainty
of our knowledge and the doubtful value of many of our affirmations.

I find a tendency amongst most grown-ups, and especially teachers
and advanced parents who ought to know better, to place too firm a
reliance on their own power to educate the young in sex. I myself
have done this. Like those drowning in deep water where they cannot
swim, we have clutched at any plank of hope. You see so many of the
old planks—religion, social barriers, chaperones, home restrictions,
and so many more, on which our parents used to rely, have failed us;
been broken in our hands by the vigorous destroying grasp of the young
generation; and, therefore, we have clutched with frantic fingers at
this new fair-looking life-raft, in pursuit of the one aim, to protect
our children.

But will it save them? I doubt if it will except in a limited and very
different way from what is usually accepted. We cannot help the young
very far or deeply by any of our teaching. Not only do they want their
own experience, not ours, but it is right for them to have it. The urge
of adolescence carries them away out of our detaining hands. And I
think it may be well that at once we realize and acknowledge the very
narrow limits of our power.

Thus I have nothing new or very striking to bring to the solution
of this difficult problem. I shall endeavour, however, to look at
the matter broadly and practically, and attempt to indicate in what
direction, as it seems to me, further progress may be made at the
present stage of our very faulty knowledge.

One of the most disturbing features that we have to recognise in
relation to the child is the very early age at which sex manifests
itself. It was formerly supposed that the sex-life began at the age of
puberty. Nothing is more untrue. Every child is born with instincts
and desires—feelings of love, of hate, of jealousy, which furnish the
motives of conduct, and are accompanied by physical manifestations of
pleasure or discomfort which express themselves, often in a veiled way,
as wishes and cravings, that find relief in action, and must therefore
be yoked either to some burden of utility or to some car of vanity.

It should be noted, however, that the word sexual is somewhat
ambiguous, because I want to stretch it to include the very germs that
afterwards blossom into the adult sex-life. The little girl with her
doll is maternal, and the boy with a tin sword is showing the crudest
manifestation of the male protective instinct.

The baby whenever it enjoys the satisfaction of realising its infantile
wants gurgles with delight. “Every nurse, and every mother who tends
her child herself knows this, and recognises as a necessary task in the
training of the child, almost from the day of its birth, the winning of
it away from this egocentric concentration on its own body.”[2]

We are always trying not to admit that we have to recognise in relation
to sex the very early age at which it manifests itself. We do not
believe this, because we dislike to believe it. Our fear causes us to
neglect in a quite wrong way the deeply affective results of the early
childish emotions.

To the uninstructed eye, early desires and feelings connected with sex
are often so unlike their final form that they pass unrecognised. But
the mother who has eyes to see and knowledge to understand knows that
the child can hide no secret. When the lips speak not, the faces in
twitching mouth and blinking eyes; the hands, in telling gestures; the
biting nails; the sucking thumb; the shuffling feet; the toes that are
played with and sucked—all these utter the truth; and betrayal escapes
out of every nervous movement of hands, and feet, and face.

We will not see and acknowledge the presence of these early emotions
because we want to see the child an angel. We cannot surrender the
picture of childhood as a period of delightful ignorance and innocence.

The very reverse is the truth. The child has brought with it much from
more primitive times; just in the same way as its body still shows
traces of earlier developments in life, so its emotions, its instincts,
its wishes and desires, revert back, in many particulars, to lower
stages of growth. Always the child has to fight its way upwards, and
indeed, it has no easy task to find and keep the right path, in its
short journey of discovery to reach from the savagery of the babe to
the level of a civilised social man or woman. If we do not help it, the
way becomes doubly hard and often the path is lost or, in other words,
the savage triumphs.

We are now in a better position to answer the question, so much
debated, as to the age at which the sex education of the child should
begin. Instead of this being a matter that can be put off until the
child is older, and the angel innocence has been sullied by contact
with an evil and ugly world, it becomes overwhelmingly important that
_no time whatever should be lost_. Every effort must be made to educate
from the very hour of birth these primitive instincts, which, though
permissible in the savage and the little child, are wholly wrong if
allowed to remain active in the later adult years. Delay is fatal. Time
lost now never can be regained: mistakes made cannot be put right. A
wrong direction may most easily be given by a careless act. I cannot
emphasise this too strongly, or too often. _The character, the life
history and the entire fate of every child is fixed in the nursery._

The mistake we have been making for so long is in regarding this
instruction in sex as something we can impart to children or with-hold
from them; a subject we may teach or not teach; enlightenment we may
give to them or conceal from them. This view is entirely erroneous.
In one sense, the whole matter really lies outside of our wills. Sex
education cannot be omitted by any parent or any teacher from the
training of any child, for it is given _by not being given_, just as
surely as the other way about. There is no escape for anyone who has to
do with a child.

You will see what I mean. It is not the good and wise lessons you may
give, of nicely arranged explanations, with flower illustrations or
stories of the mating of birds and animals; still less is it warnings
or goody-goody talks about purity; nor is it any kind of formal or even
conscious instruction that will have the true moulding influence on the
character and emotional state of the child; but what most influences
him, or in other words, teaches him, and helps or hinders him, is
the peculiarly affective state—I mean, the emotional attitude—which
usually is totally unknown to the parents and educators, and is also
quite incomprehensible to the child himself. It is all the things
that the grown-ups are trying hardest to hide from the children and
perhaps also covering away from themselves that are the real directing
forces in their character. The concealed enmity, or even small
disharmonies between the parents, the repressed tempers, the strangled
temptations, the secret longing of one or other parent, the miseries
that are hidden—all these inevitably arouse a response in the children,
which acting continuously and unconsciously bring them to a state
corresponding with that of the parents. Their shame and want of joy in
sex will become the children’s shame and want of joy; their unhappiness
in love will be the children’s unhappiness; their most hidden wishes
will escape to create disharmonies in these young and tender souls.

The parents, and especially the mother, impress deeply into the
child’s being the seal of their characters, and the more sensitive and
mouldable the child the deeper is the impression. Take, for instance,
the only or favourite child, who suffers under an anxious excess of
tenderness, so that his love is so fixed on the mother, that not only
does he become restless with too heavy a burden of emotional stress,
and often really ill, but in later life he has the greatest difficulty
in establishing his own character, freeing himself from the mother’s
influence, or finding his own love-mate. Again, in the exact opposite
position, there is the neglected and unwanted child, who, missing his
rightful possession of love, suffers from a sense of inferiority, which
dark and hindering shadow dogs his footsteps through life, finding a
positive expression in shyness and incapacity for action, or a negative
expression in bombastic and disagreeable self-assertion. So I might
continue with countless examples. Adult traits can, in almost all
cases, be traced back to the child’s early experiences in connection
with its parents and in its home.

The child is like a flower, and the banks where it grows are its
world—its home and the friends with whom it comes in contact; the sky
above is the surrounding love on which it is dependent, and to which
it looks up as the flower to the sun for gladness and for life. What
I mean is this: the child has desires and impulses of its own, but
it reflects the changing needs and atmosphere of the small world in
which it lives, and is terribly dependent on that world. It is forming
and selecting a character. It very largely tries what the effect is
of different kinds of conduct—different characters. The child does
not itself know what it is or would wish to be. Whenever there is, as
often there must be, a mistake made, a wrong step taken—a conflict
inevitably occurs, and must find some quick response in childish
naughtiness; otherwise dullness and unhappiness will arise; and this,
if continued, will tend to bring the dangerous condition of the
repressed and introverted child.

We have established now that the love-life of the child starts at
a very early age; it begins in the home, and I want to investigate
this love-life. To do this we must examine with some care the child’s
emotional relationships to the members of his family.

These relationships are not as amicable or peaceful as at first sight
would appear. At a very early age jealousy as well as love stirs in
the baby’s soul. This may surprise you. But I would ask you for a
moment to consider the baby’s position. The child is in a small shut-up
world with its mother. At first she occupies all its life. She is
the earliest love object and of supreme importance in the infantile
constellation. Everything starts from her. She is the source of
nutrition and as such the first object towards which the hunger-wish is
directed. She is also the supplier of warmth, of comfort, of rest—the
personification of shelter and happiness—the starting point of all
those interests of the child which lie outside its own body. Who can
wonder at the child’s possessive feelings in relation to its mother.
But we have seen already, in an earlier essay, how the superfluous
father comes as an intruder into this mother-child circle. And it
is in this way jealousy begins to awaken, at a very early age, and
sometimes is almost unbelievably active in the baby soul. For these
feelings will increase if the baby is a boy, and the love of the mother
may grow to great intensity, which coupled with the jealousy of the
father may work great evil, especially if the mother is unwise, too
tenderly solicitous, too possessive in her love, herself neurotic.
In the case of the girl the position is different. The baby fixation
upon the mother is, as a rule, relieved with growth, as a part of the
love-fund is transferred to the father. Sometimes this does not happen,
especially when the jealousy of the little girl is roused, usually by a
brother or sister more loved by the mother than herself. Then, indeed,
a fixation happens, either in a too passionate tenderness for the
mother, which, persisting acts as an insurmountable hindrance in the
later life in preventing the normal out-going of love to a member of
the opposite sex. I know of one such case and it may make my meaning
plainer if I tell it to you. A little girl was born in a home where
there was already a brother, passionately loved by a too good mother.
The little girl soon felt, for no one feels so quickly as a little
child, that the brother had a place of greater importance than herself.
She did not hate outwardly this brother, had she done this all might
have been well, as she would have gained relief in expression. She
developed the usual device of the unhappily jealous child and took to
phantasy making—pretending that she had another mother, or, at other
times, that she was doing some wonderful deed, being very clever, very
good, very beautiful, so as to gain the love and admiration of her
mother. This was the inner life of make-believe. The outer life was one
of continuous nervous trouble, which culminated in St. Vitus’s Dance.
What is, however most interesting, is the later love-life and the
startling way it reflects this early emotional conflict. This child is
now a woman nearing thirty, very charming, very nice-looking; but she
is utterly unable to settle on her love-mate. Engagement has followed
engagement, in each case the lover has been discarded for no adequate
reason. In all other connections of life capable and good, she behaves
in her love affairs with a capricious unkindness, very difficult to
pardon if one did not understand.

It may be worth while to refer to another case known to me. Two
daughters, with a mother and father between whom there was trouble,
the father having an affection for another woman. Though the trouble
was most carefully hidden from the little girls it formed the decisive
factor in their lives. It is not clear to me whether the love-object
was the father, though I think that this was so. It was, however,
the mother who was, as, indeed, usually she is, the central figure
in this nursery drama. Both children suffered jealousy, probably of
the lady loved by the father, transferred to the mother. The effect
was directly opposite on each daughter. The elder, stronger and more
forceful charactered girl developed a passionate rebellion against the
mother, a specially sweet and long-suffering woman, of so violent and
unreasonable character that she could not live at home; while the other
child was the absolute type of the perfect daughter, self-sacrificing
and passionately loving. But why this case is interesting is that it
was the good child who suffered while the bad child triumphed. The
rebellious daughter was able to establish her own adult life, to work
successfully and to marry happily; the dutiful daughter lost her own
power to live and to love, and was not liberated even by the death
of the mother. I would ask you to note this very specially as it is
exceedingly important. A too great devotion and anxious excess of
tenderness on the part of any one, but especially on the part of a
child to a parent, covers always, and even under the most improbable
circumstances, as when it appears that there is the closest sympathy
and harmony of will, an intense hostile tendency. And because vice
will not be choked by virtue, this over submissive state is much more
dangerous and likely to destroy the springs of life than open hostility.

We have much less need to be afraid of the future for the rebellious,
even the unkind and ungrateful child, than for the good and devoted
child who apparently knows no will but ours, and lives in outward
perfect submission. Every parent who is wise will recognise such a
state as one of the greatest danger, and at any cost to herself will
separate herself from the child. Mind, I do not mean send the child
away. That plan may, indeed, be tried, but often, especially with
sensitive children, the absence will but forge the fetters firmer.
Something like this happens whenever a child who goes to school, is
continuously homesick and becomes ill, not necessarily with a specified
illness, but grows nervous, fails in work and in play. Such a mother
has before her, perhaps the hardest task in parenthood. She has to take
the child home and dissipate and send from herself the over-tender
love, accepting in its place the rebellious hatred that it covers. Does
she fail in this task of sacrifice, made necessary, remember, by some
early mistake in the management of the child, she is simply using up
for herself the energy of love, which her child ought to have to use
for its own life.

I trust these two cases will have made plainer to you the kind of
difficult problems that have to be met by parents. I do not think there
is any family where they are not present. There are many variations,
and the strength of the difficulty as well as the permanent nature of
the harm suffered by the child, depends almost wholly on the wisdom
and the knowledge of the mother, and, even more, on the extent to
which she has been able to understand her concealed wishes and her
own love-history from her childhood’s days and free herself from its
heritage. You will see, I think, without my waiting to point out how
complex the position is, and how hard is the task of the mother to
guide the early emotional life of her children. It is obvious how
easily mistakes may be made.

Hardly less difficult is the position of the father, who is at once
the intruder in the family and the supporter of it. To the child, in
the ordinary home, he is the final authority. He occupies the position
of a god or a ruler. He is feared and rebelled against, also he is
reverenced. Any omission of these qualities, and especially the last,
is fatal to the child. Without this father reverence, and in absence
of his needed authority, there arises an arrogant disposition that
controls all the later character. As has been recognised by all modern
psychologists, there is much of the childish attitude of the boy to
his father in the later relations of the follower to his ruler, of the
worshipper to his god, of the schoolboy to his school-master.

Every boy looks forward to the day when he can escape the rule of the
father and himself usurp his power. I think you will find here the
secret spring of all later rebellion against authority, either in the
boy or in the man. I must give another warning. Again, it is when these
childish feelings of rebellion, jealousy and hate are hidden, and work
in the child’s soul without his knowledge, that the greatest harm is
done.

In this connection, I may recount the case of a boy who grew out of
babyhood shewing unusual affection for his step-father. He was also too
much attached to his mother—being in that most unfortunate position
of an only and too-much-considered child—and in consequence suffered
from strongly jealous feelings towards the step-father. In this way
a conflict was aroused between love and hate, and serious nervous
symptoms arose. The origin of the trouble was first discovered at about
ten years, when the boy developed a very passionate hatred against God.
He was overheard one day swearing on his toy sword to devote his life
to killing God. As he had not been brought up in an over-religious
home, and had hardly ever been taken to Church, this vehement hatred,
which continued for some time, was noticed as unusual. Now the
specialist consulted about the nervous symptoms at once found in this
God-hatred a projection of the very common boyish hatred to the father.
The parents learnt that this was a sign of health, an effort the boy
was making to rid himself of an unbearable inward trouble.

I would emphasise the necessity of parents having the right knowledge
and the love that will enable them to recognise what is important in
the development of character. Too little attention is given by parents
to the spontaneous utterances of children: it is these that will give
the clue to what is troubling the child. Questions never get direct
and real answers. It is what the child brings out unconsciously that
should be noted; his wishes hidden, as a rule, under some symbol,
that the parent unaided, may find very difficult to interpret. We are
too apt—and in this mothers are the worst sinners—to consider their
children as unthinking beings. Always, I believe, children know more
than we credit to them. This is true, in particular, of all emotional
states. As I have tried to make plain, it is these emotions acting
and interacting in connection with the home relations which are of
lasting importance. Mothers who even in the nursery overforce the
emotional growth of their little ones, with the unceasing demands of an
over-demonstrative and unhealthy tenderness; fathers, who, themselves
too arrogant for power, allow their boys and girls no independent
possession of their own lives—such parents are the destroyers of their
children. Their thoughtlessness and ignorance create problems that are
tragedies of pain to children, and leave them marred, and often maimed,
for their conflict with life.

I am prepared for an objection. You may some of you be thinking that
this picture I have drawn for you of nursery tragedies is coloured
from my imagination and without sufficient relation to truth. “Little
children,” you may be saying, “cannot feel these devastating adult
passions. You are projecting on to them evils created by your own
diseased mind.” And you turn back to your “angel innocence” belief,
which must be true, at any rate, you are convinced in the case of your
own child.

But may I tell you this: you must not come to these problems of the
child with an already fixed conviction that they do not exist; because
this may well be, not because they are not there—active even in your
own nursery—but because you shut your eyes determined not to see them.
You think this about their not being present, because you want to think
it, not because it is true. Also it is very easy even for the wisest
parent to be led astray; for the child is the most accomplished actor,
and is always hiding its real self from you.

You see the child has truly a very hard part to play, a part it can lay
down only when no grown-ups are by. In surroundings very opposed to its
own desires or its primitive needs, while still a savage in emotions,
it has to pretend to be what you think it is, to do what you think it
ought to do, and like what you think it ought to like. It has filled
me often with wonder and admiration to see the really brilliant way
in which even the youngest children play up to the angel-role forced
upon them by grown-ups. Much naughtiness and many violent unexplained
tempers are really a breakdown in this part. The right cue is forgotten
at the right moment, or the correct entrance is missed. And I feel it
very necessary to emphasise to you that the naughty child is not so
much being naughty as being himself. He rushes at you with a knife, not
because he is in a temper, but rather the temper is the liberating key
which allows his real desire to kill you to break through the barricade
of civilised desires that you are building around him. And it is very
necessary for the grown-up to understand the intense satisfaction of
creative strength which the child gains by this breaking out of his
real self—a satisfaction that is greatly marred, it is true, and even
turned to pain, by the consciousness of knowing he has broken adult
rules of behaviour, been a naughty boy and grieved you. Always there
is this conflict going on between his primitive egocentric desires and
the demands of the adult world in which he has to learn to live. It is
this conflict, and his success and failure in it, which determines his
growth. More and more he has to learn to give up his own desires and
subordinate his own will. Yet, I am not sure if his repentence, when he
fails, is altogether good for him. Certainly, if it is excessive, and
if it occurs too frequently, it weakens the force of life. And it is
most urgent of all to remember that the parent, or nurse, or teacher,
by constantly requiring from the uncivilised child the standard of
conduct right for the civilised adult may, and most frequently does,
produce a strain which turns the creative force of life back upon
itself. It is ever thus in life when we draw back too hastily or too
much coerced, from any spontaneous expression of emotion; the energy
gathered for the direct expression flows back impotent. I believe that
many a creative artist is destroyed in the civilising process of the
child being turned into the good boy or girl.

And this brings me to a question of the most urgent importance to all
parents and teachers who attempt to guide the emotional development
of a child; to go slowly, and never to force an outward practice of
virtue from the child, if that particular stage of virtue has not been
reached. We do not expect the child to read until it has learnt to
read, nor to calculate and work sums before it understands the use of
figures; we do not expect it to walk until it has stumbled and fallen
many times, nor to use its tiny hands with precision until it has
broken many objects. Why then should we expect it to be good without
learning to be good? And especially, I ask, why should we demand a
standard of emotional behaviour much in advance of anything to which we
ourselves have attained?

For in truth every child has a twisted and most difficult path to
travel in order to reach the standard of conduct expected by the adult
world. Few parents realise at all the harm that so readily may be done,
from any over-hastening on the road to virtue, to the child, sensitive,
responsive to every suggestion, most liable to injury; who is always
balanced between the desire to be a dirty, little savage, like himself,
or a clean well-behaved person, like a grown-up. For what gives every
adult so tremendous a hold over the child is his never ceasing desire
to push forward to a stage above what he is at. Always he is pulled in
two directions, forward to effort and good conduct and the real world
of action and of grown-ups, and backward towards ease and self-pleasing
and the dream-world of the child, in which he thinks only of what he
wants himself. If we hurry him too much there will be a regression:
the uncivilised trait that has not been got rid of by experience of
its uselessness and voluntarily been cast aside, will be thrust down
deep into the psyche, where its unrealised power sends up primitive and
uncivilised wishes, which will certainly mar the adult life, even if
they do not wreck it.

It is not from sheer “contrariness” or “nastiness” that children
develop “bad habits,” that they pick noses, bite nails, stammer, and
other much worse things, or later are too shy or too boisterously
self-assertive, or develop illness and morbid fears.[3] Such symptoms
may be replacements of infantile curiosities and interests which were
denied their satisfaction by the mother’s warning, often harmful,
however gently given, “that is not nice, darling.” In particular harm
is caused by a too early checking of the child’s delight in messy
things, making mud pies, playing with water, using hands instead of
knife and fork, and other nasty messy habits. The particular habit may,
and usually does, disappear, but the checked and thwarted energy is
still potent and at any time in after life may re-appear clothed in a
fresh dress of concealment.

All that can be done with the bad habit is to turn it into new
directions of rightful energy. As, for instance, the messy child should
be given heaps of plasticine or wax, and sand to play with. Similarly
with the desire to play with water: this is a symbolic action by which
the young child frees itself from some inner hidden trouble. I know
of one case where a child until quite an advanced age, always after a
relapse into bad and primitive behaviour, had a curious way of blowing
water through long tubes. The result was highly satisfactory and never
failed to bring the child back to good and social behaviour. As an
example of the terrible harm that may be done by an over fastidious
niceness of behaviour, I may cite a rather curious case I happen to
know, where a mother, was so afraid of nakedness, and disliking the
sight of her own body, that she actually put on a bathing dress when
she had a bath even in the privacy of her own bath room. This mother
had a son whose adult life was rendered miserable and his happiness to
a great extent injured, by horrible and haunting obscene visions. Here,
in very truth, the cleanness of the mother became the uncleanness of
the son.

I must hasten on. I am bound to leave out much that might well be
noticed, for the subject is very difficult and very wide. I hope,
however, I have made clear to you the following truths:—

(1) That any education of children in sex that is to result in success
in the after life cannot be fulfilled by the imparting of set and
fixed lessons on sex-enlightenment, given either in the home or in the
school. (2) That this education is concerned with the entire emotional
life of the child. (3) That it is continuous and unceasing. (4) And
that it is a work of such complexity that for even the wisest mistakes
are certain and success uncertain.

Above all else, I am sure we have to avoid an easy and lazy optimism.

And with such perils awaiting the incautious, is it any wonder that the
chief element of safety often is a negative one—non-interference? By
non-interference the two chief factors leading to emotional disturbance
and ill-health may almost certainly be avoided; thwarted wishes are not
thrust back, and repressed to work harm in the psyche, causing mental
and bodily ill-health which often does not manifest itself for many
years; development is not hurried on too rapidly, so that necessary
primitive stages of growth are omitted or hastened over too quickly,
causing, not infrequently, in the later years of life, a regression
backwards to primitive and uncivilised conduct.

When interference becomes necessary it must be given wisely and with
due understanding of the child’s position. I mean it must be the right
instruction for the special child at that stage of its growth—not at
all what the adult thinks it ought to be taught or would like to teach
it. There can be no fixed rules as to sex teaching; no maxims laid down
that can safely be always followed.

Take, for instance, the one apparently simple matter of satisfying
the child’s certain and right curiosity at the different stages of
its growth, by telling it the facts of birth, and, as it grows older,
explaining the difficulties that most certainly will arise in the mind
of every boy and girl in regard to these questions. So far I have said
little about this matter because most people say much; holding it as
the one thing implied by sex education, whereas I regard it, as I have
tried to make plain, as a limited, though certainly important duty in
connection with that education, which should be fulfilled by parents,
and within certain limitations, by teachers in the schools.

But here, again, I am bound to utter warnings. There must be no
over-forcing of knowledge not sought for by the child, this is at
least as injurious to the emotional growth as over-forcing is to
the intellectual growth. Any one who has read Jung’s account of his
analysis of little Anna, will know what I mean. Little Anna became
troubled and nervous, worried about the birth of a little brother or
sister (I forget which). Telling her the truth did not help her, and it
took Professor Jung many months of patient work with the child to get
to the bottom of exactly what was troubling her. The most urgent rule
for the mother in this matter is this: never to arouse sexual curiosity
but to watch for its spontaneous expression and always satisfy it when
it is present. This of course is the same as saying, always tell the
child all the truth it wants to know. The difficulty here, of course,
is that so rarely is the child able to ask for the knowledge he (or
she) wants.

What above all else it is necessary is for the mother to watch for the
child’s unconscious betrayal of its own curiosity. I mean by this, that
some unconsidered remark or act is the surest hope of finding just what
part of the problem is troubling him (or her) at that time; in almost
all cases there is a personal element of jealousy, unknown to the child
or carefully hidden, which is directed against one or other parent,
usually the father, or against some brother or sister. This is why the
intellectual teaching of the facts of birth, though necessary, does not
help very much and often disastrously fails.

As I am trying all the time to force upon you, the real sex education
is an emotional education, that is why it is so difficult. I may make
this plainer by means of an illustration which I give in my book
on “Sex Education and National Health.” It was told me by a very
wise mother of her way of dealing with her son, who was, I think,
about fourteen years old. This son showed he was thinking, and was
evidently worried, about the very small families of one or at the most
two children, or the childless marriages, common among his mother’s
friends. He did not, however, speak of his trouble directly; instead
he beat round the question, somewhat in the manner of a shying horse.
After this had gone on for some time, he one day asked his mother if
her friends were more delicate (meaning, of course, more refined) than
other people. His mother was aware of what was troubling him; she
knew what he really wanted to know was whether married people lived
in celibacy when they had not children. She wisely told him the plain
facts and for him at that time curiosity was quieted.

A boy of nine had a dream which he told his parents. His mother was
in a shop, and a man on a bicycle, dressed as an officer came along
the road; he, the little boy, rushed to the bicycle, stopped it,
flung the man off, and killed him. In telling the dream the boy said,
“I prevented him getting to mother.” This dream is so clear that I
need not wait to interpret it beyond saying that the father of the
boy was an officer. It will cause no surprise to anyone, with even a
rudimentary knowledge of the emotional troubles of children, to know
that this boy developed serious nervous symptoms.

It has seemed worth while to record these two instructive little
stories, as a means of illustrating the kind of incident which
furnishes the guide with regard to the nature of the trouble to be
looked for, and shows in the first case as well the kind of help
a watchful and instructed parent can give to relieve the trouble
prevailing in the minds of the young. Dreams should always be noted,
they throw the sharpest light on the child’s emotional conflicts.
I must again urge the necessity of the parent paying the closest
attention to the child’s prattle, to watching carefully his games and
his behaviour, for in this way only can the clue be found to make it
possible to give the kind of instruction or treatment that is wanted. I
may give a few instances. Such things as the frequent childish desire
to sit up with father and mother, the calling for the mother at night
under the plea of fear are very certain signs of active jealousy.
Again the very usual unwillingness of the child to grow up arises out
of the inability to meet the necessity of separating the self from
the protective tenderness of the mother. The child is always tending
to turn back to safety, and, if this is encouraged by the mother, the
child in after life will be unable to meet the necessities of adult
action. The too fond mother perpetuates the childhood of her son or her
daughter.

What the parents can do is to watch the child, and to learn themselves,
in order to have the knowledge to clear up difficulties as these
appear, and then it may be possible to remove obstructions to growth.
Further, they can place within the child’s reach the materials—the sand
and clean messy things to play with—machines to pull to pieces, swords
to fight with, dolls to play with—every child will need different
materials, by which, to a certain extent, liberation can be found
from their primitive instincts, by giving them a free and harmless
expression. In fact the real work of the parent may be likened to that
of the stage scene-shifter and property manager.

Parental power guides the early years of the child like a higher
controlling fate. But when the boy or girl begins to grow up there
begins also the conflict between the home attachments and the need to
break away in order to free the growing soul from the spell of the
family. It is the war between the generations. The frequent and often
very deep depression of puberty arises from this struggle. And there
are the many other, and often very disturbing, symptoms, which are
rooted in the difficulty of the new adjustments. The boy or girl tries
often to separate himself (or herself) as much as possible from his
family; he (or she) may even estrange themselves from their parents
but inwardly this only binds them more firmly to the family ties.
The outward break must be regarded as a dangerous sign of the inner
conflict which the unselfish wisdom of the parents ought to be able to
aid.

I cannot follow this important matter further. But I would wish to
say that this is the time for the teacher to step forward and take up
the work begun by the parent. The parents at this period are often
hindrances to the child, they must push their children away from them
in order to help the growing souls to gain their liberation.

The uncertain and, as I fear they may seem, unsatisfactory conclusions
that must result from any honest inquiry into this difficult question
of helping the young at the start of their life’s journey, is due in
part to the fact that, even yet, and in spite of all the new knowledge
that has been gained in the last few years, we know very little about
the child’s emotional processes. Unfortunately our knowledge is not
sufficient to make it possible for any dogmatic statements to be
placed even tentatively before parents. There can be no ready-made
prescriptions, no certain cures. We do not even know where the greatest
trouble lies, whether it is in the parents and the teachers—the adults
who fail to understand the child; or in the child, who fights away from
the understanding that those who love and train him are able to offer.
We do know, however, that the difficulties on the part of the child
are very great—much greater than most of us (whether we are parents
or teachers)—satisfied in an easy grown-up optimism, have cared to
realise. In many ways we—the adults—the parents and the teachers, we
who are a generation behind the children and already have been through
the long, struggling, upward journey, by which they are now travelling,
ought to manage our love and our training for them more carefully, more
sympathetically, and more intelligently. I say intelligently, because
the sins committed in love against children are more lastingly harmful
than many of the sins committed under neglect or even under unkindness.

Thus, the final word I have to say to parents in regard to their
children is this:

_Do not love your children too possessively._

Try to understand and respect them—realise their existence as
individuals with interests and needs apart from yourself. If
necessary send them from you. Do not love your children for your own
satisfaction, but for their good, and to help them to establish, with
as little disaster as possible, their own lives.




SEX INSTRUCTION

THE AGE AT WHICH KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BE GIVEN


A story is recorded of a father and mother in ancient Greece, who,
being concerned for the welfare of their only son, went to a renowned
teacher and asked him to educate and take full charge of their child.
“How old is your son?” questioned the teacher.

“Just three!”

The sage shook his head. “I am sorry but you have come to me too late:
the boy’s character is decided already.”

I was reminded of this most instructive story as I read the account of
the evidence given by the Rev. the Hon. Ed. Lyttelton, before the Birth
Rate Commission of the National Council of Public Morals. For while I
agree wholeheartedly with the late headmaster of Eton College as to the
necessity of instructing the young in the facts of sex, I disagree,
with his view as to the method of the teaching and, even more I
disagree emphatically, as to the age at which instruction should begin.

Dr. Lyttelton holds that the first lessons should be given at the age
of nine years, when the boy ought to be taught the facts of maternity,
this knowledge to be supplemented by further teaching at the age of
twelve or thirteen explaining the even more important (for the boy)
facts of paternity.

Now it is here that I venture to disagree, and think that Dr. Lyttelton
has fallen into the very common error of underestimating the child’s
intelligence and boundless curiosity. It is in the very early nursery
days that sex education is most urgently needed. To wait until the age
of nine years has been reached is often to wait too late. In a vast
number of cases, it is locking the stable door after the horse has been
stolen.

In all children the activity of the intelligence begins to work at a
very early age, and parents, who are not willfully blind, must know
that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive desire to
know many elementary facts of life, which are dependent upon sex. The
primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know where
“the new baby comes from.” A child of four or even younger, may begin
to ask questions on this matter quite simply and spontaneously. The
degree of curiosity, as also the frankness with which it is expressed,
will differ, of course, in different children, but I am certain this
curiosity is present and at times active in all children. If they do
not question their elders, they will certainly puzzle over the matter
themselves; often they will talk with older companions, and gain the
information they are seeking in the worst possible way.

Thus the first teacher of the child must be the mother, the one who is
most constantly with the child, tending him in washing, undressing, and
in all the daily needs of his little body. It is the mother who ought
to be the child’s supreme trainer.

Few of us understand the confusion and hurt that may be caused by a
mother’s stupid silence and even more stupid hints and evasions and
made-up fables. The false stories of babies brought by the doctor or
the stork, or a little sister or brother found under the gooseberry
bush are never believed. While the fantastic ideas of birth, that the
child makes up for himself, fix their untruth into the immature minds.
And afterwards they cannot be checked, owing to childish concealments,
which always spring up so rapidly to meet any expression of adult
reticence. These birth-fantasies, though the child seems to out-grow
them, are not really forgotten but remain active in the unconscious
mind. In this way, trouble is often started that will be determinative
of the gravest evils in the later adult life.

Parents are greatly to blame for not answering the questions of their
children, and being blind to their natural curiosity. And I would
emphasise again that this curiosity is present even when no questions
are asked. There need be no spoken words to make the child feel that
its questions are discouraged. All adults are surprisingly ignorant
of the affectability of children—their quick response to every kind of
influence.

In the case of the birth of another child—an usurper who takes the
older child’s place—this affectability is exceedingly acute on account
of the emotional disturbance, in excitement and possible jealousy.
And by means of the adult attitude, the very certain interest and
investigation of the child into what is happening may so easily become
confused and connected with what is shameful and wrong; and the trouble
is aided, and usually in the worst possible manner, by the sharpest
observations and deductions made by the child _from unconsidered
actions and overheard remarks_ of parents, and of servants and other
adults—none of whom have any idea of the child’s watchfulness or his
curiosity in this matter.

_We think little children are not interested in birth because we do not
want them to be interested._ And they, with the almost uncanny sagacity
which children show, understand this desire only too well and too
quickly.

I had a striking illustration of this curious adult blindness quite
recently. Two mothers, who were sisters, were pregnant at the same
time. Each mother told me privately that _her children_ were not
interested in the event or in any way curious, but that _her sister’s
children_ were curious and wanting to find out what was happening. It
would have been useless to tell these mothers the truth. Yet both of
them were intelligent. They believed that their own children had no
curiosity because _they wished to believe this, not because it was
true_.

Thwarted curiosity is one of the most frequent causes of emotional
disturbance in the first years of life. Do we not all know children who
as they get older exhibit an unreasoning curiosity about everything,
opening drawers, looking into the envelopes of other people’s letters,
searching excitedly for what they do not want. We want to ask the
question: Why does the child do this? What is it that urges him to act
like a “Peeping Tom?” For he is urged. You will find this habit of
needless prying almost impossible to check. It may persist into adult
life. Do not we all know grown-ups who cannot refrain from prying,
always curious, they are, on all occasions, seeking for knowledge they
do not want.

This seeking action is symbolic. It implies that the search for the
thing that is not wanted, the curiosity over something of no interest
at all, is a substitute action for something that at one time was
wanted—something about which knowledge _was desired_, and desired so
much that it _would not be denied_. It was a curiosity so real that the
thwarting of it has started emotional trouble of which these searching
acts and persisting curiosity are the symbol or sign.

This substitute formation is one of the commonest emotional processes
in children. The child pries, open drawers and letters, collects
useless objects, aimlessly searches for knowledge he does not want
_because there is some knowledge he wants tremendously badly, but
cannot speak about_. That is why he persists in his habits of peeping
and prying in spite of your scoldings and punishments. He must persist,
unless you deaden his character so terribly by your ill-judged
repression that even this substitute relief is closed. Your child
will then, probably, find some other make-believe comfort; he will
bite his nails, pick his nose, or other much worse habits may begin,
or again the emotional disturbance may be so acute that it becomes
impossible for the child to face, so that he fails in achieving any
kind of symbolic replacement. The thwarted and emotionally over-charged
curiosity is thrust back into the psyche where it remains a cause of
ill-health of body and uncleanness of mind, until that time in the
adult years, when the harvest of tares is reaped from the bad seed that
has been sown.

The parents have the greatest responsibility, as I have said already. A
child of four or even younger may begin to ask questions of its mother,
simply and spontaneously. _It is the child who must guide the parent._
But again I would give warning. The mother must not be over-eager, or
she will fall easily into the error of stimulating instead of quieting
the child’s restless inquiring mind. The child at the age when such
questions will first be asked and should be answered, will very quickly
tire of any information that may be given to it. It will break off to
run away and play and will interrupt the most beautiful and carefully
prepared lessons. And if the mother is wise she will never go beyond
the interest of the child, or the satisfying _and nothing further_,
of the special curiosity which at that special time is occupying the
child. If this course is pursued the child will probably continue
to ask for information—though there can be no certainty that this
desirable result will follow. But where such opportunities arise the
right kind of sex instruction can be attempted. For the mother will
be able to give answers in natural conversation, which will not force
information not sought for by the child. When so treated, it will be
found that children are not over-burdened by the subject, they will
interrupt and break away from the answer to the question they have
asked to speak about toy soldiers or dolls. This, to me, is the immense
value of this form of teaching: the child has the information, and yet
does not trouble about it when it is not to the point. Such a result
can never be gained by means of set talks or fixed lessons, especially
if these are mixed up with warnings, and much vague talk of things that
the child neither cares for or understands.

I should, however, be giving a wrong impression if I left the matter
here, so that this answering of children’s questions seemed to be a
simple matter. It is not simple. For each child, as for each adult the
problems of sex are personal problems. And the child whose problem
is the hardest—who most urgently needs help, will hardly ever ask
questions. Instruction in sex is not _and never can be_ like teaching
the child about other things. That is what so many of the modern
advocates of sex education so entirely forget.

In every child, as I have tried to show you there are hidden conflicts
of jealousy, of love, of hate, which determine beforehand its response
to the teaching that is given by the parents.

I cannot here treat at all adequately this difficult question; it is
one on which I have written elsewhere (_Mother and Son_, _Sex Education
and National Health_, _The Mind of the Naughty Child_) I can say
only what I have emphasised already that from the start to the end,
_sex education is an emotional education_. That, of course, is why it
is so difficult.

There is, in my opinion, too firm a belief in the efficacy of formal
instruction. The way is not so easy as this to discharge our debt to
the young. And sometimes I fear that parental talks about sex, in
particular when such talks are delayed until the boy or the girl is
reaching puberty, or until the time when the dangers of school life
have to be met, involving, as it must, a sudden breaking through of the
silence of years, may work for harm instead of for good. That this is
so in the case of some boys and girls I know to be true. You see you
cannot grow flowers in a soil choked already with weeds.




THE MYTH OF THE VIRTUOUS SEX


A day or two ago I was passing one of the great London schools at the
afternoon hour when the boys were released. I write “boys,” but among
them were many of sixteen, seventeen, or even eighteen years who looked
almost men.

On the street side, two flappers, quite young—not more, I should judge,
than fifteen, stood with their faces pressed between the iron rails and
watched the exit of the boys. Certainly they were not nice girls; they
invited with smiles, they giggled, they ogled, they gestured. There
could, I think, be no mistake as to the purpose of the girls.

I am glad to record that no single boy took the slightest notice of
them.

Now this very unpleasant incident has set me thinking. I am oppressed
with feelings of responsibility; yes—and also of shame. If I am to be
honest I must accept here, as in all relations between the two sexes,
the validity of the mans’ plea that rings—yes, and will continue to
ring—through the centuries: “The woman tempted me!”

Now, though we may accept this responsibility in theory, most often
we repudiate it in practice. From time to time—and the intervals are
not long apart—efforts are made to pass new laws which are supported
by many virtuous people—laws, whose one purpose is to increase the
punishments of men for offences against young girls.

I am in whole-hearted sympathy with any changes in our law that will
afford greater protection to young girls. I cannot, however, refuse to
see the reverse side of the question. It is proposed to raise the age
of consent for girls, while at the same time a woman is not to be held
responsible for seducing a boy who is much younger than herself. This
is unjust.

Why should we afford a period of protection longer for the girl than
for the boy?

It may, of course, be argued that the boy is better able to look after
himself. This is not true.

The girl grows up more quickly always than the boy; emotionally she
is far more developed, and, therefore, should be more, and not less,
responsible than he is. I have no doubt about this at all.

No boy knows very much about love until some girl or woman has taught
him.

Of course, the view of the evil nature of men, and of women as always
the victim, is one that can hardly fail to be pleasing to women,
depending, as it does, on their moral superiority, which stamps them
as Amazons of Purity, on the glorious mountain heights of virtue, from
where they must send down climbing ropes and ladders, in the form of
prohibitions and regulations and new laws, to pull men up out of the
deep valleys of vice.

But if we inquire more honestly into this question of men’s sins, we
shall find that it is not they who are wholly responsible. There is
little difference between men’s virtue and women’s virtue.

Almost unceasingly in our streets women are tempting men.

Always there is the invitation near: “Come and make love to me.” To
be provocative is the one simple rule of many women’s lives. Men’s
admiration is a necessity to their very existence.

True, in the after results, the woman may be, and, indeed, often is,
the victim—has to pay the heavier price; but at the start she is the
leader of the assault.

The essential fact in every relationship of the sexes is the woman’s
power over the man, and it is the misuse of this power that is the
beginning of sin.

Do not think I am unfair. Most men, I know, are not only tolerant of
women’s wiles; they like them. But most men succumb, I believe, against
their will, and often against their inclination, to the tyranny of
their own aroused passions.

Men’s chivalry, as well as their pride, has woven a cloak of silence on
this question of the temptation they are so frequently called upon to
resist and this silence has protected women—even the worst.

Let us alter our laws to help girls by all means. Yet, let us be just.
There is such a thing as too much temptation for a boy—temptation that
a woman has no right to give.




SENTIMENTAL TAMPERING WITH DIFFICULT PROBLEMS: WITH SOME REMARKS ON
SEX FAVOURITISM


It is sometimes difficult to have patience with the proposals that
are brought forward, so frequently and with such persistent zeal,
to amend our Criminal Law. One cannot doubt the sincerity of these
efforts to improve our disordered moral conditions. But something more
than good-will is required. There is such a thing as over-haste in
righteousness.

Besides, the attitude taken by these scavengers of conduct is almost
always sentimental and one-sided. It is also dishonest. I say so,
because almost without exception, they fail entirely to meet the true
facts of the evils they attempt to cure. As reformers they seem to
have but one idea; if they have more, they keep them secret, for they
agitate but for one object.

Morality is a word that has been wrested from its true meaning of the
whole duty of man in his social character and limited to the one narrow
application of sexual conduct. It is curious and significant. It is
as if we transferred to others some judgment which unconsciously was
imposed from within.

Yet obviously the strongest impediment against effective reform lies
just here—in this blindness to reality; this separation from the truth.
I need not wait to enlarge upon this further, it is impossible to
contradict. To judge blindly is to judge upon a lie.

Would you ask me to give you examples?

There is, to take one illuminative instance, the long continued and
still unsettled agitation for raising the age of consent for girls.
Those who are chiefly eager for this reform invariably evince frenzied
zeal, combined with the most curious and deplorable ignorance of the
real facts. I cannot for a moment believe that they are in the least
degree, consciously blind. But that does not alter the fact that they
are blind. Instead of facing the situation squarely with knowledge and
due consideration of all the complicated conditions, they ignore every
thing they do not want to see. They wallow in sex-righteousness.

Consider again the controversy that raged now sometime back, with
regard to the White Slave Traffic. The sudden frenzy. The unproved
stories of the trapping of girls! The clamour for legislative measures!
Every moral reformer became obsessed.

The instinctive attitude of the one-ideaed reformer had a unique
chance of displaying itself, and one marvelled at the almost
curious enthusiasm, mated to inexperience, with which the subject
was approached. While the most offensive feature of the agitation
was the sex-obsession, which gave rise to the silly notion of the
helpless perfection of women and the dangerous opposite view of the
indescribable imperfections of men. It is no exaggeration to say that
every sense of reality was lost in white clouds of virtue.

I would wish to make it plain that I am not judging these questions
either on one side or the other. What I desire to show is the danger of
a prejudiced view. And the danger is particularly active in connection
with all these attempts at changing the law, in order to give greater
protection to women and girls, while, at the same time, boys are left
unprotected.

This unpopular view of the need to protect the boy from the girl—the
man from woman—the temptress of man—is not usually brought forward.
Yet, it is a view of the situation, seen from a different side, that
cannot be neglected. The evidence is overwhelming of girls of sixteen
years and even younger tempting boys of the same age as well as those
older than themselves. If in such cases the boy is to be punished and
the girl treated as a wronged and helpless victim, not only will a
great unjustice be done, but there will be a very certain danger of
graver demoralisations.

This truth of the woman’s power, which depends upon Nature and not
upon law, the supporters of a one-sided alteration of our criminal law
too often fail to face.

I am reminded here of a little incident that happened many years ago.
I had quarrelled seriously with a man, who before I had always liked
and respected, for what I then considered was his light treatment of a
certain girl who was my friend. She had written and told me her side of
this occurrence.

Very well I recall what he said: “You don’t understand. She asked for
it.” Then, when I pressed him further, he went on. “A man always treats
a girl in the way she wants him to do.”

Now, one of the greatest troubles in connection with all
sex-legislation to-day arises from this fact that _women do not
understand_. They are inexperienced and in too great a hurry. They
think they can cure old evils with quick penny-in-the slot reforms.
There is still a chivalry that protects women and shields their
ignorance. These illusions are maintained, even by men of the world,
who are acquainted with all the complex difficulties. It is the
romantic view, a kind of male blindness that nothing seems to cure.
Women must be protected from men, who are the great offenders in all
sexual sins. Often I have marvelled at the acceptance by men of a view
of the sex-conflict so highly untrue, though flattering to women,
depending as it does on their entirely unproved moral superiority.

And here I wish to ask your attention to a consideration of the
question that is very rarely appreciated. I regard it as exceedingly
important. Those who are possessed with a frenzy for protecting girls
ought to remember that there is still greater necessity to protect
boys. It is forgotten that the young girl is not usually in constant
close relations with other men than her father and brothers. She has to
be guarded only from the _outside lover_, whom _in the first beginning
of intimacy she could, if she wished, easily repel_.

The reverse is the case with boys. In a sense, they cannot escape from
situations of danger. At school, in lodgings, even at home, in sickness
and also in health; on every occasion opportunities are provided that
make abuse exceedingly easy. The part played in the sexual initiation
of boys by servants, by lodging and boarding-house keepers, and by
other women who have to tend, and feed and mend for them is much larger
than is credited. It is folly to close our eyes to the evils that so
often arise. _Probably every man who is a seducer of women was himself
first seduced by a woman._

In spite of the emancipation upon which women pride themselves, in
spite of much theoretical knowledge, yes, in spite of social and rescue
work—where, it should be noted, they hear the woman’s story but only
in the rarest cases the man’s story—almost all women lead a shielded
life. Much that happens is outside their experience—as long as they are
virtuous. This sets definite limits to their knowledge and their power
of comprehension. And this again explains the continued belief in the
woman’s notion that, _in all cases_, the girl is the victim of the man.

It would be nearer the truth to reverse the position. Girls need to
be taught their great and unavoidable responsibility. They should be
trained to be protectors rather than to seek protection. _Men will
treat them as they want to be treated._

Let us now, for a moment, be practical and consider if there is any
reason we can discover, which will explain why we hear so much more
about the seduction of girls and the sins of men than we ever do about
the other side—the tempting by women and girls, and the seduction of
boys. The answer is simple. The boy will not talk about what happens to
him if he is led into a sexual offence at an early age. This is true
also to a large extent of the man. But the boy especially considers
he ought to have known: also he is much more self-conscious. Then he
expects to be blamed for not resisting, whatever the circumstances. He
will probably not tell anyone, unless the girl does so, until years
afterwards.

I know a schoolboy who was seduced by a woman relation years older than
himself, in a very shameful way. This boy was of high character and
very sensitive; he suffered in ways impossible to relate here, but he
never told anyone until about ten years afterwards, when he told the
woman he was to marry.

Now, if this case had been reversed and a young schoolgirl had been the
victim of a male relative, I am fairly confident the fact would not
have been concealed. Girls, even if not wholly innocent, almost always
will tell, because it has at all times been allowed to them to blame
the man. They thus can count on sympathy. This means much more than
usually is reckoned with.

Let me give a less tragic instance of a different and humourous
character. A schoolboy, about seventeen years old, was waiting for a
motor-bus in which he was going home. He was a dreamy boy and a bus
came up and, lost in his thoughts, he did not take it. He was brought
back to reality by a girl accosting him. “I waited, too,” she said.
“You, are glad arn’t you? You would like me to go in the bus with you.”

She smiled up at him: but he was not to be caught.

“I don’t care, the hell, what you do as long as you don’t expect me to
pay your fare!”

That silenced her and sent her away. But how easily, had the boy been a
less confident type, the incident might have taken a different course.
And then, if disaster had followed, the boy would be blamed, the girl
would be pitied. There is an enormous amount of sex unfairness.

I could recount many further cases in proof of how almost always it
is the girl (or the woman) who takes the first steps in forming these
friendships. Men, at least, will know that I speak the truth. And
yet this fiction of the greater virtue of the woman is persistently
maintained: while the man is condemned as being nearer the devil and
the beast.

I know that the many horrible cases of criminal assault upon children
will be quoted against me, in proof of the justice of this heavy
condemnation of men. Please do not think that I am in any way unaware
of the awfulness of these crimes. The protection of little children
is the one matter on which I feel most deeply. But there can be no
fair comparison between this class of crime and the ordinary cases of
seduction, whether we believe it is the man who seduces the woman,
or the other way round, the woman who tempts and excites the boy
or the man. In the one case an unhappy and terrible degenerate is
passion-driven into the commission of an atrocity, in the other there
is, and, indeed, must be to some extent, a mutual purpose, usually with
some calculation and a certain deliberate choice.

That is why it is so false to reality to regard the one partner as
a helpless victim. It is really a position that is impossible and
ridiculous. Are we to believe that all women are impotent and imbecile
weaklings incapable of resisting men? The truth is that in slandering
men we only slander women with the backward swing of the same blow.




THE SEDUCTION OF MEN


Quite recently an action has been brought in the High Courts by a wife
against a woman for the seduction of her husband. It is the first
time a charge of this kind has been heard in an English court of law,
though, I believe, such actions are not unknown in the newer lands of
America and Canada.

The case is one of very special interest, and opens up many questions
that go right down to the deepest problems of the relationships of men
and women.

As we should expect, the action failed. It was held that the man had
not been seduced. He was not enticed away from his wife by “the other
woman,” rather, it was the other way round. The man, not the woman,
must be held responsible; she had yielded to him only at his desire,
after persuasion and against her will.

But is this true?

As already in the two previous essays I have emphasised, perhaps
over-emphasised, the accepted, very sentimental and peculiar judgment
in all these cases. The woman the victim: the man the seducer. He the
active sinner: she the passive sufferer. All the blame to be heaped on
to him: all the pity to be given to her.

Really it is difficult, as so frequently I have stated, to have
patience at this shelving of the real facts. It seems to be forgotten
entirely how tremendous is the power of the woman in all love
relationships. Why a man under the influence of a woman he loves is as
easily led and as devoid of all will-power as a young child. Indeed,
he becomes the child of the woman, as soon as, and for as long as,
he loves her. He is her’s to make or to destroy. She strengthens him
enormously or irreparably injures and weakens his resistance. She can
hold him to the hardest duty and keep him in the fine path of right
doing. It is she leads him, not he who leads her, into the easier ways
of love.

Yes, it is women who shape the souls of men as it is women who gave
them birth.

That is why this view of the man’s responsibility in love being
greater than the woman’s is so singularly untrue. If we inquire at all
truthfully into this question of seduction, it is obvious that not the
man but the woman is the more responsible. For one thing, she knows so
much more about love, from the beginning, and _without being taught_,
than a man ever knows. Most often it is the woman who takes the first
step, breaks down the first barrier. Always there is the invitation
which unceasingly she gives, whether consciously or unconsciously
expressed—“Come and love me.”

Her dress, her movements—all invite love. To be provocative is however,
little she knows it, the one fixed simple rule of her life. In the end,
and indeed, sometimes very soon the position may be reversed, but at
the start assuredly the woman holds the cards and can make the first
move in the love-game. She is the pursuer, far more often and far more
truly, than the pursued. Too often she directs a continuous attack.

Her relation to the man is comparable to that of a magnet to a heap of
iron filings.

Love to a woman so often, when she is young, is less an affair of
passion than of excitement. It gratifies her insatiable desire for
power. The boy or the man more certainly is driven by love. This is
his principal motive. While the girl often starts on the adventure for
the sake of experiment and because she wants amusement. She pursues
love almost as a game. Passion plays a part only in the second degree.
Not infrequently, in the midst of love, the coldness of her heart is
plainly apparent.

This may seem a hard saying. I believe it is true.

Seduction as the crime of the man alone cannot, I am convinced, be
accepted, in any case without great caution. It is, as I have said
several times already, so comfortable to place the sins of sex on men.
But I doubt very much if any woman _can be seduced against her will_.

I must insist again that excitement and escape from dullness, as
also the joy in receiving presents and having “a good time,” are the
principal motives that first lead girls into illegal relations.

Sometimes it is worse than this.

Many women, seducers of men—women who draw men from their wives and
their homes, and their duty, are nothing but cold experimentors. They
are speculators in love. They do this for delight of power, in the same
way as men are speculators in business.

Perhaps the position is unavoidable.

The subjection of man is a necessity to some women’s existence. Love
is to them a similar feeling to love of the chase. They cannot keep
from pursuing men. It is, as I have said, an expression of the ever
increasing demand for excitement. Conquest in love gives to women the
opportunities for the fulfilment of themselves, which men gain in many
different departments of life.

But no man, I think, could satisfy completely the craving for
dominion, which the delusive humility of his desire awakens in this
type of woman. Then when she commits the error, from a womanly point
of view, of hunting down her man; leading him on by helping him too
much—seducing him, instead of waiting for him and drawing him slowly
and unconsciously by her love, she awakens the same instinct for
dominion and thirst for excitement in the man. It is then that the man
becomes a seducer of other women. It is the lust to devour, to crush,
quickened into being by suggestion. It explains, I believe, the cruelty
of all wild love.




PLAYING WITH LOVE


Many girls to-day try deliberately to keep love light. Shrewd enough
to understand the heavy claims of serious love affairs that lead to
marriage, they prefer flirtations of weeks only—episodes that are a
secret and, as it were, detachable part of their lives.

It is a dangerous state.

Emotional power and the enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life are
dried up by such constant stimulation. A new diet of excitement must
always be provided. The object of life is to cheat time and to crowd
out boredom. Whatever is going on they must be in it from a jazz dance
or river picnic to a church bazaar.

In the old days it used to be only duties for girls—now it is rights
and pleasure with the demand to be left to make their own lives. There
is a turning away from duty; a hatred of anything dull.

Girls as I have just shown you want love as an experience and to
provide the always desired excitement. They do not want to marry and to
settle down.

Thus while condescending to fascinate men, while deliberately seeking
attention these young women still hold themselves in hand. Intending to
exploit life to the uttermost they find love amusing, but they fight
always against its being a vocation.

There is calculation and dangerous hardiness in their attitude to their
lovers.

Their transitory love affairs are, indeed, regarded in very much the
same way as formerly they were regarded by the average young men—as
enjoyable and thrilling incidents of which they are ashamed only when
they are talked about and blamed.

With no sex conscience, these wantons of excitement have no
consciousness of womanly responsibility. Each new affair affords an
eagerly snatched tribute to a colossal and restless vanity.

This is one type of woman who to-day plays with love.

There are as well other girls of a different character, less concerned
with pleasure, less consciously vain, more emotional, and to men more
interesting. They are incessantly thinking of their own personalities;
and, for this reason, they are equally, even if not more, harmfully
destructive in the utter misery they often create.

These are the girls who are always emotion hunting.

Impossible to tell what are their pseudo-feelings. A sort of sterile
passion, which expends itself in their failure to know, and find, what
they want.

They do not wish consciously to escape the responsibilities of
marriage; indeed they seek unceasingly the perfect man to whom they may
surrender their freedom. But they suffer from a formless discontent
that rots into every love and prevents them finding satisfaction.

Consumed with haggard restlessness, such girls pass their days in a
dangerous state of expectancy and nervous tiredness. Eternally they are
unsatisfied without knowing why.

Born spiritual adventurers, these worshippers of emotionalism,
attitudinising and thinking perpetually of themselves, desire at all
cost a position in the limelight. They love romantically, but rarely
are they strong enough to obey their inclinations. Such girls are out
on an eternal quest; and, every now and again, they believe they have
found the ideal man they are seeking. Then they discover they have
not found him, so their search is taken up anew. While often their
insistent egoism, which causes them to ignore the rights of others and
all social obligations, drives them into dangerous corners; does not
give them a chance; turns them to use mean weapons of deceit; forces
them into false situations that too often close around them like a trap.

Many other nobler types, besides these two, have been playing with love.

Girls of profound and steadfast emotional nature are rare. The great
majority of girls certainly are not entirely light-minded, but they
are less serious, more noisily determined to do what they want, to
get what they can both out of men and out of life. They are very like
children, playing at desperate rebels, who take up weapons to use far
more deadly than they know.

All this playing with love is detestable—all of it. It bears witness to
a poverty of emotion and a shameful shirking of responsibility.

Women are the custodians of manners in love. The future rests
with them. And this responsibility cannot safely be set aside,
dependent as it is on forces active long before human relations were
established—forces which press on women back and back through the ages.

Yes, woman has laid upon her the sacred necessity of seriousness in all
that is connected with Love. It is a duty imposed upon her by Nature,
and one that she cannot escape. That is why there is so much danger
in these restless neurotic years, when girls are too excited to be
serious.




SECTION III

MARRIAGE AND OTHER RELATIONSHIPS




IS PASSIONATE LOVE THE SUREST FOUNDATION FOR MARRIAGE?


“There is no subject,” says Bernard Shaw in the preface to _Getting
Married_, “on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than
marriage.” And though I disagree rather violently with Mr. Shaw’s
views about marriage, he is right here. We do talk dangerous nonsense,
which need not matter very much, if we did not think absurdly, and so
inevitably have to pay the fruit in wrong action. This explains, I
think, our curious levity, our unhappiness, and fierce refusal to face
facts.

We have infested our ideals with the poison of pleasure and turned away
from essential things. Marriage is not a religion to us—it is a sport.

I say this quite deliberately. I am sure we know better how to engage
a servant, how to buy a house, how to set up in business—how, indeed,
to do every unimportant thing in life, than we know how to choose
a partner in marriage. We require a character with our cook or our
butler, we engage an expert to test the drains of our house, we study
and work to prepare ourselves for business, but in marriage we take no
such sensible precautions; we even pride ourselves that we do not take
them. We speak of _falling in love_, and we _do fall_.

The conventions of to-day are false; they are bound up with
concealments or with an equally untruthful openness. It does not,
however, follow from this that mere destruction will be enough, that
everyone’s unguided ignorance will lead to success and freedom. The
_laisser faire_ system is as false in the realm of marriage as it
is in industry and economics. While equally false, though this is
rarely recognised, is the modern spiritual view of marriage that love
can be found only in perfect harmony of character between the wife
and the husband, _and is independent of duty_. It is true that love
differs from lust in its deeper insight into the personality, deeper
interest in character, as opposed to the inexpressive smooth outline
and “untrained” physical beauty of the body. But the character and
intellect may be studied and loved as self-centeredly, as much with a
view to the enjoyment of mental excitement, as the body itself.

Of all of which what is the moral? This:

In marriage, as in other things, we fasten our chains about our own
necks. We do not find what we desire because we do not know what we
want.

The very word love is used in so general and indiscriminate a way to
denote sometimes the most transitory impulse and sometimes the most
intense feeling, that a mass of misunderstanding arises. The emotion
which most often passes under the name of love is a maudlin, sickly
sentiment or passion founded on hypocrisy, which means nothing at
bottom but the desired enjoyment of a passion which is felt but not
understood, and which professes to be everything but that which it is
in reality.

With more courage to face truth, we should have a surer ideal; there
would be much less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about
marriage. Our romance is slightly vulgar. Vulgarity is a sign of
weakness of spirit, that spirit which is “the life that carves out
life” as Nietzsche says.

We associate romance with courtship and not with marriage. “Thank God
our love-time is ended!” cried a north country bride on the day that
marriage ended her long engagement.

Now, I do not know whether this delightful story is true, but it does
illustrate the attitude of many ordinary couples, whose love adventure
ends at the very hour it should begin.

Every marriage ought to be a succession of courtships.

A very slight knowledge of existing marriages is sufficient to convince
even the most optimistic believer that true mating is hard. I do not
believe that most marriages are unhappy, but I do know that only the
very few are happy. With many perhaps, and even with those who are
passionate lovers, the attraction of sex always seems to fall short of
its end; it draws the two together in a momentary self-forgetfulness,
but for the rest it seems rather to widen their separateness. They are
secret to one another in everything; united only in the sexual embrace.

Can we, then, ever find perfect love? Is it not like exercise of the
body? You can develop it to a certain point, but not beyond, without
danger; and very slowly, with continued patient effort. Do we not need
exercise of the soul? I do not know. Often I feel I know nothing. To
some men and women it is all simple enough, a woman is just a woman
and a man is a man. The trouble begins when any woman becomes the one
desired woman and any man the one desired man.

There is gain and development in this selective tendency of Love—and
yet, if I am right, there is terrible danger lurking in the application
of this egoistic spiritual view.

We may not safely ask too much or too little from marriage or take too
high or too low a view of it.

I am not very hopeful of improvement. At least, not for a long time,
and never unless we learn to be more honest about ourselves and about
love.

In fear, we have tried to keep the blinds down so that love may be
decently obscured. Yet how can we ever begin to understand and deal
with these problems of sex unless we will admit all the instincts and
tendencies which ever lead us backwards to the more elemental phases of
life? The deepest of the emotions is sex, and its actions, like all the
emotions that are fundamental, may be traced into a thousand bye-paths
of the ordinary experience of each one of us; it exercises its
influence on every period of our development, and works subconsciously
to control our actions in endless ways that we refuse to acknowledge.

Hence the conflicts which manifest themselves so strangely and so
fiercely in our lives. The emotional-self refuses, at times, to be
controlled by the reason-self. Restraint cannot do much, and indeed,
often brings deeper evils. For our unconscious selves are stronger than
all the pretenses and guards we have set up by our conscious wills,
either as individuals to encourage our own conceit and egoism, or
collectively as a so-called civilized people in the hope of controlling
conduct.

That is why so much that is said to-day about sexual conduct is so
foolish. The real question is not what _people ought to do_, but what
they _actually do_ and _want to do_, and, therefore, are likely _to
go on doing_. It is these facts that the reformers of marriage almost
always fail to face.

To me, one thing, at least, is certain, the romantic view of marriage
has failed us.

But we cannot change the ideal of to-day unless we have ready a new
ideal to inspire our conduct. We cannot destroy a sanctuary unless we
first build a sanctuary.

There is a strange idea among some young people to-day that sexual
happiness can be gained by breaking away from all the traditional
bonds, it is the visible sign of our confusion as a people, and the
want of happiness in our lives. The new generation should not set at
naught the experience of the ages.

The individual household where both parents share in the common
interest of bringing up the children, is the foundation on which
marriage has been built up, and on which it must stand. If the
conditions of the home are seriously changed, and the bearing and
caring for children is no longer considered an essential part of
marriage, a change in marriage itself will follow. I do not think you
can hold the one if you let the other go. For Westermark is right, and
children should not be regarded as the result of marriage, but marriage
as the result of children. And love between men and women implies
duties and responsibilities that go out beyond themselves; without
this, even love of the most passionate kind, loses its quality and
tends to become an ephemeral or even a corrupt thing.

There is much stupidity in the view of many reformers of marriage
who fail to see that, however hard it is to live faithfully to the
obligation, and unchecked responsibilities of love, the old ideal of
marriage does so appeal to our emotional nature, that men and women are
seriously unhappy in trying to destroy it.

Not all who cry “It is useless,” can do without the limiting safeguards
of children and of legal marriage. We still feel the serpent’s sting of
jealousy and the old questions, “Where do you come from?” “What have
you been doing to-night?” “Who handled your body till daytime, while I
watched and wept?” “In what bed did you lie and whom did you gladden
with your smile?” are still felt, even if not uttered by the lips, of
the most emancipated husbands and wives. For our sex-judgments are not
intellectual, nor are they merely moral; they are not just questions of
understanding and forgiving, but they are also physical, of the nerves,
of the blood, of the fiercest instinct.

Fortunately it is easier to talk of love’s freedom, than it is to act
as if it ever could be free. And in spite of what advanced people say,
some feeling of duty in sex will always exist as long as it hurts us
at all to hurt others. The immorality that says, “Do what you desire
irrespective of others,” is as yet beyond most of us.

Attempts to solve these problems quickly are bound to fail.
Intellectual revolutionists are, I think too hopeful with regard to
what may be done to produce a harmony of sexual needs. The optimism
that once prevailed in regard to economics is being transformed to
sexual matters. Once people supposed that if every one followed his own
interests a harmony would automatically establish itself in the economy
of society. Now they tend to say the same about sex.

Intellectual views of life and what is right and wrong always act
to break people into groups, each struggling to explain everything
according to one theory, built on a single principle. And as the result
of caring so much for one thing, people seem quite unable to grasp
any facts that do not refer to their own particular reform; they are
not able even to consider it as part of a world in which there is
anything else. All the evil in marriage? is due to too large families
and populations pressing upon the food supply, we are told by one
class of enthusiasts, while others point to men’s tyranny over women.
Emancipation for women, with an equal moral standard, would have a
magical effect: men are all bad say some. The father is a parasite,
unnecessary except for his share in begetting the child; the mother is
the one parent. All would be well if legal marriage were abolished and
motherhood made free, is the view common among one class of reformers.
Eugenical breeding and sterilisation of the unfit is the remedy brought
forward by others. Many suggest economic changes and the endowment of
motherhood.

But the matter is not so simple as these reformers seem to believe.
And I doubt if any outward change is really capable of producing the
prompt kind of penny-in-the-slot results that its supporters claim that
it can. The complexity of marriage (in particular, the occurrence of
sexual disharmonies so present and active for misery to-day) is ignored
by all intellectual reformers. It is because they have no emotional
hold on life as a whole that they find it easy to squeeze all life into
their magic theories. For myself I can see no sure remedy—though in a
later essay I shall try to suggest a palliative: but were I asked to
state my deepest belief, I could say only “A few thousand years more of
development, a growth towards consciousness and a fuller understanding
of the meaning of life.”




MARRIAGE REFORM


Many people seem to be in fear that any change in the marriage laws
will destroy marriage. “Hands off! No tinkering with marriage!” they
cry in a panic of timidity and moral anger.

I marvel at this want of faith. Do they, indeed, believe that the
institution of marriage rests on a trembling quicksand, so that its
supporters are compelled to build a scaffolding of lies to sustain its
foundations?

The laws of marriage are only the register of what marriage is: they
do not control marriage. There are no laws, for instance, to regulate
the perfect love-unions of birds, whose faithfulness and family life
present a beautiful and high standard of conduct.

Let there be no mistake here. I have been told that I wish to destroy
permanent marriage, that I do not consider the welfare of children and
the best interests of the race. I deny these charges; they are untrue.

My ideal of marriage is one that many will call old-fashioned. It
demands the consecration of the mother in service to her husband, to
their children, and the home. That is why I advocate the recognition
and regulation of other forms of union, not because I have a low ideal,
but to prevent the degradation of marriage by forcing into it those who
do not desire, and, therefore, are unsuited for, its binding duties.

The immense failure of marriage to-day arises from the confusion of
our desires and our ceaseless search for individual happiness. We
have no firm ideal, no fixed standard of conduct either for women
or for men. And the existence of many standards of what ought to be
done; the liberty permitted to the man, the liberty permitted to the
woman; if the wife shall continue her work or profession or remain
at home dependent on the husband’s earnings; whether the marriage
shall be fruitful or sterile—these are but a few of the questions
left undecided. And thus to leave men and women unguided, with their
own ideas of what is good to do and what is evil, is the dry-rot very
surely destroying the ideal of marriage.

Every couple starts anew and alone, and the way is too difficult for
solitary experiments.

This modern delusion of looking at marriage as an individual affair is
of course, the essence of the selfish, egocentric habit of life—it
focuses desire on personal adventure and personal needs. With more
courage to face the realities of love we should have a surer ideal.
There would be less sentimentality, but much deeper feeling about
marriage.

This, then, is what I would teach: No longer must marriage be regarded
solely as a personal relationship. Marriage is a religious duty.

“To be mothers were women created, and to be fathers, men.”

This was the ideal which gave the breath of life to marriage among the
men and women in our earlier England, who were more fixed in character
and less selfish than we are to-day.

It is this ideal we have lost.




TO-DAY’S IDEAS ON MARRIAGE

ARE WE SEEKING VAINLY AFTER HAPPINESS?


The love-story of to-day differs in one essential way from the
love-story of yesterday. Yesterday’s love-story always had a youthful
hero and heroine, and ended with the marriage bells. To-day’s, which
is a far harder love-story to write, begins with marriage. Moreover,
the bride and bridegroom are rarely young, nor are they ravishingly
beautiful.

Earlier authors in short, shirked the real problem of marriage. They
ended where they should have begun. For the main difficulties, in that
always difficult adventure of the two learning to live as one, do
not lie in youth, the period of quick adaptation, of easy falling in
love. The trouble does not often begin in the courtship or honeymoon
days; but it comes later in the struggle to harmonise and bend the
character to the demands and lessons of marriage, and in the continued
effort of maintaining love _after knowledge of love has come_. There
is the difficulty. The preservation of love when all the passionate
preliminaries are over.

Love is not walking round a rose garden in the sunshine; it is living
together, working together. And the honeymoon is as trifling as the
hors d’oeuvre in comparison with wedded life, and as unable to satisfy
the deep needs of women and men. And the greatest difficulty rests in
the fact that very few of us understand what our deeper needs are.
Even to ourselves we are strangers. That is one reason why marriage is
always difficult.

You see so often the partner one falls in love with does not make a
good life companion. It’s all very well to moralise, but you can hardly
ever be certain beforehand how these relations will turn out. There is
physical attraction and passion, and there is affection—just being pals
with each other. Who is to know which is the more necessary—the better
for happiness of these two? You ought to have both, but few couples are
so fortunate as that. We are almost all of us divided in our desires
and our wills as also in our love.

The boys or girls to-day are, I think, more natural. There is much
greater openness and less pretence. Even our novelists frankly say that
every woman looks with special interest on a well formed man. There
is no convention marking this as improper, “the baser side of love.”
We Victorians were everlasting children in an everlasting nursery; we
did not play with love, but we fiercely refused seriousness towards
the fundamental emotions. Perhaps that is why we lost the old firm
tradition of marriage and its duties, and why we have succeeded in
putting nothing in its place.

The disease of our wills and the sickness of our souls has rust-eaten
into marriage. We are doing nothing because we are too frightened to be
serious. We have sought to drown our unhappiness and the exhaustion of
our souls, to fill emptiness with pleasure; to place the personal good
in marriage above the racial duty; to forget responsibility, and, in so
doing, inevitably we have turned aside from essential things.

We have missed happiness in trying to grab at it.

Cannot you see what is wrong? We are so terribly tired of this search
for something that we never find. We are like little lost children, we
run, this way and that, we cry and make much noise, in fear, seeking
for our mothers. Yes, our adventures are the tricks of the child who
fantasies so as to pretend that everything is right when in reality
everything is wrong.

Love is a dream to those who think but a terrible reality to those who
feel.

The frequent and tragic failure of so many marriages arises from a
confusion of our values and our undisciplined wills. In one way we
expect too much from love, while in another we expect too little. What
we have lost is any fixed standard of duty. I have said this before: I
must say it again.

Marriage has ceased to be a discipline, it has become an adventure.

It is, little as we may believe it, the search for deeper and more
perfect love that so often endangers love. Seeking, always for the one
satisfying mate, we must find a partner corresponding in every respect
to our ideal. The man in Mr. Hardy’s novel, “The Well-Beloved,” spent
forty years in trying to do this, and his ultimate failure is typical
of the experience of most of us.

Fools and blind, we neither understand nor seek the cause of our
failure.

We need a new consciousness of our social spirit and racial
responsibilities in marriage: the idea of handing down, at least as
much as we have received. We are the guardians of the Life Force. Let
us honour ideals of self-dedication; of fixed obligations of the one
sex to the other, of duties to our children long before they are born,
and let us spread the New Romance of Love’s Responsibility to Life;
then there will be in society in general and not in a mere fraction of
it, happiness in marriage and passionate parenthood.




WHY MEN ARE UNFAITHFUL


There is a question I would ask all wives, whose husbands having left
them, are to-day seeking relief in the divorce courts. What was it that
first sent your man away from you? What was it that first turned him
from the safe happiness of marriage to seek the restless unhappiness of
unregulated love?

It will not do to dismiss this question with the old unreasoning
condemnation of men; nor will it serve to talk of their polygamous
nature and uncontrolled passions. Let us look at the matter a little
more closely, and with greater regard to truth.

In marriage the woman dominates more often than usually is known. For
one thing she has the children on her side. I think marriage is more of
a duel than usually is acknowledged. One partner wins, kills the other,
kills all that makes joy and life—makes the one who conquers a captain;
the other—the conquered one, a servant, slave—what you will. It is so
always, more or less. And in this marital duel there is no quarter;
and, nine times out of every ten, it is the woman who holds the cards;
she who wins. If she is clever, she knows this—knows the game is in her
hands. But the dice she has to throw is her sex, and she has only been
allowed one throw! And when she has thrown wastefully—Yes, it is here
that disaster enters into marriage and makes tragedy of the game of
life.

But there is another side—and a side that is of immense importance to
women.

Undeniably the greatest function of any man in the life of the average
woman is to be the father of her child. All other things he means to
her are secondary to this. For this reason, after the birth of her
first child, she frequently ceases, though she does not know it, to
love her husband as a man, and for himself.

The feeling of a child against a woman’s bosom is more to her than
the kiss of a lover or the devotion of a husband. What is it that she
feels? It is a liberating power; a sensation of unaccustomed unity—like
a strong tide that carries her over everything, makes her unconscious
of the worry of the days. It is life itself. It irradiates all the
world about her, all that belongs to her—her very soul. She has become
one with life—a creator, as a god.

That is why so often the man—the husband and the father, finds himself
left outside this charmed circle of life.

And even when the marriage is childless (as happens most frequently in
the marriages that come to the divorce courts), this same passionate,
grasping maternity acts—indeed, acts sometimes with added fierceness
and even more disastrously. She mothers her man, but she does not love
him. She gives him the protection that she should have given to her
children but she holds back the inspiration and the spur that he most
needs from her.

The woman’s life so often is filled with attending her children or her
husband, whom she loves (I must press this home again), where she has
no children, not as a mate, but as a child. She ceases to consider him
as a man—to belong to him as completely as he belongs to her.

She holds back more and more of herself—the vital part that he wants,
while, at the same time, she demands more and more from him. The man
feels that he is losing, giving up his individuality with all that he
cares for most, and, after a period of loneliness and unhappiness,
broken, probably, with some bluster and conflict, he gives in and
begins not to care.

The result in the end is almost certain. The lower types of husband
from time to time, will break away and find compensation in wild
love. Some will seek distraction in work, or will develop a temper
and nerves. Other men of more refinement will suffer much more, till
they too break away at last; they will turn from the reality of life
to dreams, unless they too seek and find love and sympathy with some
woman, who, without the binding security of marriage, is more careful
to understand them and to love them for themselves.

Most wives have yet to learn the deeper responsibilities of love; and
this not at all in regard to their duties to their husbands, which most
often are too perfectly fulfilled, but in the more intimate and far
more exacting task of giving them spiritual freedom as well as sympathy
and understanding.

I believe that this failure on the part of so many wives, in holding
back just what the man most craves and seeks for, is the real cause,
to which all other causes are subsidiary, of that failure in the
continuance of the husband’s love, which brings so many marriages,
which started in happiness, to the disaster of the divorce courts.

In my opinion, the greatest cause of error is in women’s limited
experience which makes their judgments hard. While another cause arises
from the tendency, and already I have emphasised more than once (a
tendency due to a deep inner cause of sex difference) to throw the
whole blame for sexual sins upon men. Some women carry sex antagonism
like a flag, which they flourish in every wind. These are, of course,
a small minority, but the majority of women fail to take a wide, sane
view both on this question of the unfaithfulness of husbands and that
of the whole physical relationship of marriage.

And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter
these inharmonies of love by any cut-and-dried reforms. The expression
of sex is a question largely of understanding. Its regeneration must
begin with a movement, in particular, on the part of women, towards a
truer acknowledgment of their own natures and an acceptance of men’s
needs.

I dare to think of such a regeneration of Love, but it must come
through education in consciousness and a fuller understanding of life.
And by education must be understood all that influences the unconscious
as well as the conscious self, so that our full life may be lived in
harmony, and not with one half of ourself in enmity with the other
half.




WHY WIVES ARE UNFAITHFUL


It may, and I expect will, be said that I am looking at this question
of faithfulness in marriage from the man’s side only. This is not
because I do not see and sympathise with the woman’s position. I am
thinking really just as much of one partner as of the other. What I
wish to do is to focus attention. For this reason, I am insisting upon
the fact, of the wife’s coldness as being most often the first cause
which drives the husband from his affection and his duty. I do this
because it is just the real cause that is almost always neglected,
unrealised, in particular, by women themselves.

Women have been taught to believe, and do really feel, that by sexual
unfaithfulness a husband does them the cruellest possible wrong that a
man can do to a woman.

It is rare to find a woman who is not sexually jealous. To possess
and to hold, even when she has ceased to desire the possession, is a
quality that is exceedingly common in wives. And our iniquitous divorce
laws, with their obsession with sexual offences, help to maintain this
view of marriage.

But is the man ever wholly to blame? It is so easy to talk
self-righteously of the unfaithfulness of men—of their polygamous
nature and their attraction to wild love.

I never heard such nonsense. Men are the most faithful creatures alive.
After all, almost in every case, the man has given away only what
his wife has shown him she does not want for herself. As long as she
desires him, indeed, often, _as long as she will put up with him_, her
man will stick to her—yes, _stick with the closeness of the proverbial
burr_.

Most English wives always are acquiescent, rather than passionate
in the sexual embrace. Even when in love, they are shy and often
unresponsive. Hiding what they feel, rarely showing their husbands
that they want them with any real desire. Then, after a few years of
marriage, his embraces are either evaded or repulsed, if not, they are
_suffered as a duty_.

Everyone who does not blink facts, knows that the vast majority of
marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. Very often
this starts from the beginning of marriage. The wife is disappointed:
she finds the husband different from the lover of her dreams.

In the story of _Beauty and the Beast_ we have material out of which
part of the great sex difficulty can be explained. In the fairy story,
the husband, who before marriage looks like a beast, after marriage,
becomes a prince. In real life the story is inverted. There is a
deluding force in the mere skin and limbs of those of the opposite sex
at the time when maturity is reached which may give princely attributes
to those who would be seen as beasts at other times. The prince seen as
a beast after marriage is a tragedy into which the romantic, ignorant
girl must beware of drifting. The man who most boldly plays up to the
romantic part expected of him, reciprocating to the perhaps unconscious
encouragement of the girl—is not the man who will be most agreeable
to live with. I believe there is real danger in the sentimental view
of love that is common to most girls. They do not know the poverty of
feeling that loudly expressed sentiment may hide. The defect of many
unfaithful lovers is not sensuality, but sentimentality. The lower
types of lovers are strangely, almost incredibly sentimental.

It cannot, I think, be denied that sexual anaesthesia is present in
many women and there would seem to be evidence that even where it is
not present before experience of love, it arises _after marriage_. Any
number of wives are unable to give themselves up to the sexual act in
such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness
and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The evil
would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they
do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold, are
sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women,
probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to
the man’s desire. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They
want response to their own love in their wives, but most of them are
very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to
enable her to give such response.

In short, as we found in the previous essay on unfaithful husbands,
woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her his child.
But when she turns from him, she leaves him unsatisfied. The drama
and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed, intrudes
itself on every hand.

We have, by our wrong ideals, for long been inducing an entirely
perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of which
women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a thing in itself degrading
and even disgusting—the nasty side of love and of marriage, something
to be submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children or for the sake
of the loved man whose passions must be allowed, but not a thing for
health and desire—for the delight and perfection of the woman herself.

This false view, I affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still
is, the destroyer of sexual happiness and health. And this fear and
denial of love; this separation between the passion allowed to the man
and not allowed to the woman, is the serious side of this problem of
marriage. For the hideous disguises and constant lying, too often made
necessary to both the partners, owing to the wife’s entire failure
to realise the physical necessities of love, makes domestic life an
organised hypocrisy.

We fight and fight to be free. Yet ever the concealed antagonism lays
fresh hold, upon both the husband and the wife. It crops up in many
and curious ways, imposing its poison and destroying life—the deep,
deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied love.

The need for love will not often allow itself to be inhibited without
claiming payment. And if desire so frequently manifests itself in
abnormal forms of the coarsest and commonest dissipation, this is
almost always to be explained by some hindrance opposed to its normal
expression. When women face facts and realise this truth, many things
in the conduct of husbands will be clear that hitherto have been hidden
from them.

There is, however, another aspect of this question which now must
be considered. For to leave the matter here would be the greatest
injustice. A further question must first be asked. Why is this coldness
in women so prevalent? Why does the desire of even the loving wife so
often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult question to answer.
One reason has been given already. We have noted women’s false attitude
to love; an attitude which, in so many cases, makes her ashamed of
expressing openly the passions she feels. Yet there is, I think another
and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Love is a more
difficult thing for women than it is for men. Each man is able to
enforce his sexual desire upon his wife _at a time when she feels no
desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his_. We may,
perhaps, trace back to this cause, many of the feelings of disharmony
and waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love.

I must follow this a little further. In marriage the husband, usually
exercises his marital privileges _when he wishes_. He does not think
sufficiently of, or understand sufficiently as he should, the wishes of
his wife. For what _she says_ must never be accepted as representing
really what she wishes. It is very hard for any man to understand how
almost impossible it is for a woman, if she is good, to be frank about
sexual desire. Both our laws, and opinion and custom have strengthened
the view—not usually openly acknowledged but usually felt—that the
husband has the right to approach his wife when he desires. Her right
is not equally considered, too often it is taken for granted that
she has no desires or real sex-needs to be considered. The result
is inescapable. The man’s passion finds relief while she remains
unsatisfied. She is in just the same position as someone who is forced
to eat a meal without appetite.

And inevitably this leaves her unresponsive, makes her irritable,
capricious, and quite incomprehensible to her husband.

Of course, this disharmony, is not always conscious even to the woman
herself, who usually fails quite to understand what is the matter or to
connect her restless unhappiness with the stirrings of her unsatisfied
love. The dyspeptic does not know that he wants food: he turns away
from it. In the same way the woman turns away from love. She gives in
to the inhibiting influences and accepts the abysmal misconception into
which one sex has fallen in regard to the other.

This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes
is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of misery in
marriage. It will take very long to over come it. Only as we advance
in refinement and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act
lessen, as the woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how
to arouse and keep aflame her desire.

For woman is passionate. There is no greater lie than the so often
reiterated assumption that she “_is naturally and organically
frigid._”[4] We must remember that this view of woman’s coldness in
love is of comparatively modern growth. Yet it is a lie that will
take a real revolution in our moral ideas to uproot. It is, in large
measure, at least, the result of our pretences—the horrible, grasping,
destroying, back-wash of shams. It is the result of the way in which
women have lived, with blinds drawn down on most of the unruly
disturbance and elemental forces in love.

The wife whose love is turned away from her husband finds substitute
satisfaction in her home and her children, if she has them, or, failing
these, in dress and amusement and other outside interests; or in a
lover, who gives her new hope of finding satisfaction in love. And the
poor bewildered husband is quite unaware of the cause of this coldness.
He cannot understand his wife’s unfaithfulness. He does not know that
his unthinking acceptance of her subordination to his desire, however
gladly given, is what has, and indeed must, exhaust the passion in her.

For I do not deny, as already I have stated, that sexual coldness is
exceedingly common on the part of the wife to-day. What I do deny
is that this is a natural condition; rather is it a symptom of the
mistakes of our civilisation that have cheated women and men alike of
health and happiness in love.

I affirm again, that this idea of coldness in love being natural
to women is entirely false. Complete absence of satisfaction in
love cannot be borne, especially when living in the close intimacy
of married life, by any woman, through a period of years, without
producing serious results on the body and the mind. It is in the
blighting effects of this pseudo-celibacy that we must seek the cause
of the sterility of so many married women’s lives.

Do I put this other side of the problem of marital-celibacy—the woman’s
side—in a strong light. Yes I do, but I put it faithfully as I have
come to know it from the facts I see daily around me.

It is hard to say how often, and how many wives have put from them
the temptation to seek happiness in love _at any price_; no less hard
is it to compute to what extent the transformation of this suppressed
sexual passion is expended in passion in other channels. We see it in
a hundred cases to-day. In every instance where passion is called for
woman tends by her nature to be carried further than man.

There is, of course, no exact measuring in these matters, but who among
us can dare to say that the harm done by the deprivation of love is
greater in the lives of men than of women? I doubt not it is the other
way. We hear so much of the sex-needs of husbands that we have become a
little wearied. We accept so much for them as being right and natural,
but who shall calculate the number of equally right and natural
impulses that women have resisted?—resisted until the very instinct to
love tends in time to become dulled and blighted.

I am willing to grant, indeed, that few women experience that obsessing
longing of the man to grasp the woman of his desire, nor do they, as a
rule, I think suffer the same terrible physical depression that causes
incapacity for control. I am not certain here: women are less open
about these matters than men are, and one hesitates to judge other
women by oneself. We are dealing with a question very difficult to
solve. We may find some explanation in the fact that many passionate
women have had to learn how the energy of the sexual impulse may be
diverted into other activities. It is a lesson that possibly men will
have to learn. Yet I do not know, the price women have had to pay has
been heavy and the results gained very poor. And does not this denial
of love entail a waste of life?—that is what really matters. It is very
hard to know the truth.

Here, then, is the question I would put to men who are suffering to-day
from the unfaithfulness of women. I would ask them. Have they taken
sufficient trouble to understand, both on the physical and psychical
side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much more complex than
their own? The art of love is not understood by men. If they paid more
attention to this subject marriage would be freed from the strongest
and most frequently operating cause that brings it to disaster.
But this will never be done until we have ruled out from our moral
conscience the idea of “the body as the prison of the soul.”

I have often asked myself if this misconception is not the real cause
of all sex trouble?




SHOULD DOCTORS TELL?


Of the many differing opinions concerning the question whether doctors
should reveal medical secrets, none that I know have been more
interesting, in particular to women, than that of a local practitioner
(whose name I have forgotten) who spoke at a Conference of doctors
met to consider this question. In opposing with admirable frankness a
resolution for the continuance of the practice of professional secrecy,
he asked the straight question, whether “a bounder” should be allowed
to live and his wife and child to die?

For here we touch at once the grave difficulty of the position. The
discussion, as is evident, was concerned more particularly with the
position in regard to venereal diseases.

The whole question has, indeed, been brought before public attention
in connection with the recommendation of the Royal Commission on
Venereal Diseases that a communication made by a medical practitioner
with regard to these diseases and to guard the innocent from infection
should be regarded as a privileged communication, and the law of libel
be so modified as to give this safeguard.

Now, on the face of it, this would seem a simple matter. And the
question I want to ask is, why the professional medical voice of this
country has pronounced so emphatically against it? I know, of course,
the reason that is given, that the divulging of a patient’s secret,
without his or her consent, and even if for a good reason, must weaken
confidence—not only the patient’s confidence in the particular doctor
who “told,” but the confidence of the public in the whole medical
profession.

I do not think this reason bears any close investigation. Confidence
is destroyed quite as surely, though probably not so quickly, by
suppression of truth as by revealing it.

No, I believe we have to look deeper for the reason to explain this
attitude of medical hiding.

These diseases are set apart from all other sicknesses of our bodies.
For this reason, in considering them, moral considerations become
confused with practical values. And I do not see quite how this is to
be avoided. There is however, the gravest danger from such an attitude
which rests upon hidden personal prejudices, and is not dependent on
the facts of the case. Such an attitude leads inevitably to concealment
of truth, which is specially disastrous here, because it is absolutely
essential that these diseases, if they are to be cured, should be met
in the open and grappled with methodically and thoroughly.

For greater clearness, I may state the matter thus: There are three
attitudes that may be adopted towards sexual disease. First, that of
the pure moralist, who says only “This is a sin to be punished.” On
the opposite side is the purely utilitarian, who says, “This is only a
disease to be cured.” But both attitudes may be alike wrong or, more
correctly, the truth lies midway between the two. The disease, as a
disease, needs to be cured. This is the first step with which nothing
should interfere. But far different and much more complex is the
treatment required to alter the actions that lead to the disease.

As a first step, public opinion ought to condemn too late marriage,
instead of recommending it on economic grounds. The mania for making
economics the deciding factor in conduct should surely cease: the
falsity of this view has been exposed by many great writers, but much
stronger is the condemnation that must be given here by all who can
understand the evils that it has wrought in our sexual lives. Late
marriages must be one of the causes contributing to men’s use of
prostitutes before marriage.

We have to find a way out, to silence our shrieks of blame, and to give
up many of our old pretences. You can never get things right until you
honestly face them.

Women are the worst sinners. And I say, without hesitation, that it is
men’s fear of women, especially the husband’s fear of his wife, that is
the greatest hindrance to openness in this connection. It is women’s
attitude which holds us back in progress towards health.

Let me give an illustration. I attended recently a meeting where a
paper was read on the morals of men, in connection with the alarming
increase of venereal diseases since the war. The reader of the paper,
being a woman doctor as well as a feminist, took the wise view that the
most urgent question was not the reform of the men, but staying the
spread of the diseases. In the discussion that followed it was plainly
evident that few of the audience—all women—agreed with her. These were
women workers, who had read about, and to some limited extent, at any
rate, thought and studied, these questions. Yet the general view was
that men ought to be punished. One speaker, who stated that she was
married, said that no true woman could or ought to forgive a husband
who had become infected with a contagious disease.

Now, it is this view, here so crudely expressed, that has done so much
harm in the past. It explains also the continuance of the medical
secrecy that has acted so strongly against the stamping out of this
scourge of civilisation. Such an attitude of blame and unforgiveness on
the part of women has to be changed before the truth can be told safely.

Women are mainly responsible for the secrecy of these diseases. And
what is the result? Because these infectious diseases are secret they
are largely uncured.

It is, of course, easy to understand the attitude taken up by women.
Blame of men is not easily avoided; yet is there not confusion in
women’s minds?

The sin that a husband commits against his wife, a man against the girl
he is to marry—yes, and a son against the trust of his mother—is in
being unfaithful. Having caught the disease is a misfortune. The effect
must not be blamed by itself.

Let me illustrate this point of view by considering a different case.
Your child gets scarlet fever by an act of direct disobedience—the sin
of his age. He stays from school, without leave of absence, and goes to
play at a house he has been forbidden to enter. Would you, because of
his disobedience, refuse to pity and nurse him? Rather, would you not
forget his sin and desire only to help and heal him?

Do you see what I mean now? It is not that I would condone immoral
conduct in the husband or the lover that I plead for pity and
understanding on the part of women who love them.

Few men are intentionally evil. They do not even always act foolishly
in this question of infectious diseases because they are wantonly
careless. Often they are fully alive to the danger that may result to
their wives, or the girl they wish to make their wife, from their own
infection.

I repeat, they are not necessarily bad men, and they love their wives
and children; but they are cowards. All men are cowards when it comes
to facing the blame and misunderstanding of the woman they love.

If they cannot rely on the woman’s pity and help, few men will dare to
tell the truth; nor will they be willing to let the doctor tell the
facts for them. And if the truth cannot be told, it is very unlikely
that the infection will not be spread to others. This may lead to the
birth of diseased children, and who may say that in this case the crime
is the man’s alone?

Why can’t we face the situation now, when we are trying to tidy up our
social life? Concealments that may have been necessary in the old time
of ignorance are surely impossible now.

Is the evil to remain hidden, uncorrected, from one generation to
another? Hidden evil multiplies itself, and the sum is national
deterioration.

The mistake has been the muddleheaded thinking that has obscured the
plain and comparatively simple question of cure with the entirely
opposed problem of moral appraisement and punishment: a confusion and
losing of the way that has led us all inevitably into a forest-tangle
of difficulty, of lies and silences, and unanswerable questions.

And this heritage of wrong thinking is still compassing our feet,
binding them and throwing us down, as soon as we try to move a step
onwards: and until that entanglement is broken through, by bringing the
whole complicated position into the light of understanding and honest
thinking, the evil will go on, unchecked by our futile tearings here
and there at withered branches. The supporting stem of concealments and
dishonesty will flourish, and the devastating evil will continue to
spread.




THE MODERN WIFE AND THE OLD-FASHIONED HUSBAND


The old-fashioned husband is always older than his wife. If he is not
old in years, he is old in character. His desires and instincts are
aged. She is young because she is alive.

He wants to give her advice, but she will not listen. He desires to
guide her, or he must think that he does so. He protects her. Thinks
of her as young and precious and tender. He does not speak of certain
things before her. He caresses her, he pays her bills, gives her
presents, and treats her in the way, in which she has learnt not to
treat her children.

For the old-fashioned husband is conservative and hopelessly romantic.

The fact is he ever seeks in his wife the image of his mother, the
first woman whom he worshipped, and whose virtues remain as an
unforgettable pattern, ever to be repeated. He sees her darning
socks (horrible and useful occupation), making beds, dusting the
china, arranging flowers, brushing her husband’s overcoat and
smoothing his hat, fussing needlessly over everything. These
pictures are always interfering with the image of his wife—the new
woman of to-day, with her restless and noisy movements, her slang
and violence, her knowledge, capable management and clearness of
vision-that-look-you-straight-in-the-eyes air that belongs now to wives.

Why have women altered so greatly? Why have women gone on and left
their husbands behind?

It is common to refer everything back to the war. Certainly the war did
this—it sent both women and men into difficult schools but the men’s
school was harder and quite different from that of the women.

If the war had a devastating effect, the peace has likewise had for
women its revolutionary consequences. We all know what the war did. It
took women out of their homes. The feminists rejoiced to see women in
munition factories, on the platforms of trams, squeezed into government
offices, hoeing and driving the plough. Then the peace threw them
back; closed the open doors, cut off the day of financial prosperity,
re-introduced them to their children, if they had any, and to their
husbands.

And now what happened? What effect had this on the desires of women and
men?

Why, the husbands yearned for the old order of home and wife and
children. For the men had fought, they had experienced the uttermost
bitterness of life. Their petrified imagination had had no new ideals.
They wanted nothing changed. For them a terrible interlude was over, a
nightmare passed, that must be forgotten. But the non-combatant women
had not experienced war; they had only looked on. For many of them a
glamour of patriotic achievement in various kinds of work, which they
much preferred to the old domestic duties, added to the lure of high
wages, had thrown a cloak of romance over the war-period. They had
nothing to forget. The last thing they wanted was to go back, all their
desire was set on going forward.

Here then, is the reason why to-day there are so many modern wives with
old-fashioned husbands.

These war-trained women are very efficient; they impose their will on
everyone; they are attractive and very honest, but sometimes rather
aggressive with their assurance and massed information. They go to and
fro from their homes, when they like and how they like. The husband
knows almost nothing of his wife’s friends. He supposes it is all
right. But he understands that he cannot stop her, cannot control
her interests. She makes his house her home, is his friend and dear
companion, but she does not stay in his charge. Often he feels like a
stranger, helpless, not knowing what to do.

Wives are now almost more independent than husbands used to be. “I want
to do it, therefore, I must do it,” is their acknowledged cry. They
are on such good terms with life and with themselves that they cannot
imagine another view—the old view of the woman sacrificing herself.
There are quite a lot of things they won’t do; they are very simple
and straightforward about them.

Nowadays it is not fashionable for even young unmarried girls to
remain in the guarded shelter of the home. Old-fashioned fathers
and brothers, are sometimes alarmed at the freedom of friendship
allowed—the light-hearted pairing off. Life is a game, a dance, like
the figure in the lancers where you “visit” and waltz away, but then
come back to do the same thing with another partner. Yet these girls
are not without hearts; but they realise that they must know men before
they can choose the one man to whom they may give themselves. They
have almost nothing in common with the boneless emotional heroines
of the past. They are very practical and know that love will not pay
the baker’s bills, and after realising all this, they have schooled
themselves not to fall in love carelessly.

They look all life squarely in the face, understand their duties,
what they will do and will not do, in a way that may be hard, but is
admirably sane and admirably honest.

Here is an incident. An exceedingly modern girl was engaged by some
ill-chance to an old-fashioned man. She came once to talk with him of
her future and his. She was not fond of children and therefore, thought
she ought not to have any. Gently he placed his hand over hers, “That
will be as God wills, my darling.” She sprang from him, “It won’t,
Ronald, that’s not true, it will be as I arrange.”

It used to be so different. The old-fashioned girl could never have
spoken with such frankness. Wife or maid she was always younger than
the man she loved. She studied him, listened to him, quoted him. She
lived only in and through him. _At least that is what he thought._
He did not know that she did not really listen, was tired of his
stories, not interested in his business or his friends. All her seeming
submission and acceptance were used to hold him.

The opinions of the old-fashioned woman were quotations from authority;
her motto was obedience, but her practice was sweet rebellion. Very
rarely was she honest. Her eyes were so blinkered that she saw nothing
that she did not wish to see.

No, I am not sorry for old-fashioned men. They remain so childishly
blind. Let them grow up, or at least, conceal their paleolithic ideas.

The new types of modern women face the future with laughter and the
present with quickly responsive feeling. They give still to the
world the essential gift of the eternal feminine, though they are
cutting away the worn-out unreasonable exaggerations of perverted
femininity—the coldness of the vicious woman, the unkindness of the
grabbing woman, the ignorance and submission of the old-fashioned good
woman. They are able to see everything and to help in everything,
without being deceitful, without being dulled.




THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUNG WIFE


Everyone is busily trying to explain why there are so many unhappy
marriages at the present time, but few people seem to realise that one
of the most prolific causes has been the comparatively recent tendency
of women to marry out of their class. We all know that all social
distinctions were in abeyance during the war, and even afterwards.
Normal class separations, conventional standards, old careful habits of
conduct have been largely broken through at a time of great uncertainty
and many changes.

Some of us hoped that this new co-operation which seemed to be
springing up between men and women of different social classes would
lead to permanent changes. We forgot that excitement is the most potent
intoxicant, and that after excitement there is usually a falling back
into dullness and apathy. But certainly for a time there was quite
a new loosening of the guiding-rein of reason, that has allowed the
horses of impulse and instinct freer than ever before to pull the car
of ourselves and our fates in this direction and in that, just as they
chose.

The many misfit marriages bear witness to the excited condition of
women.

And it ought not to be difficult to realise, with the least gift of
imagination, the conflict and the unhappiness, almost necessarily
resulting, from such unions, entered into during that period of
topsy-turvy conditions, between the man who had “risen” and the
more complicated type of modern girl—the girl of brains and nerves,
passionate, intellectually emancipated and delighting in her new-gained
freedom; yet, at the same time, fastidious, ruled by traditions and
inherited habits, which crop up unexpectedly, with a conservatism that
is neither acknowledged nor reckoned with.

The men who in commerce or in war had a meteoric success have, in many
cases, fallen back; they are but clerks, shop-assistants, artisans.
They themselves, and everything belonging to them seem different. While
they were accepted as gentlemen, because of what they had done or the
money they had made, they married “above them” as the phrase is. And
now when the money is spent and what they did no longer remembered,
they cannot find work that will enable them to maintain the outward
show of being a gentleman. The intoxication of excitement is over, and
their wives complain, not only of their position, but of them.

The temporary gentleman and his young wife, in many cases, are finding
that it needs a lot of grit and a lot of duty to keep in love. For
the rose-coloured glasses of courtship have been replaced by the blue
goggles of matrimony. They are already unhappy, though they expected
happiness. You see, their love has been tested by the love-destroying
test of poverty. And these difficult days have cast their homes into
disorder.

We have all felt the world’s wave of trade depression: the world’s
difficulties have dealt a blow, causing a leak to spring in many a
frail boat of domestic happiness, so that its inexperienced navigators
no longer can exercise control over the journey.

Now it is customary to blame the wife. Always it is the woman’s fault.
She is, or ought to be, the home-maker. While no one seems to consider
how much depends on the character, or conditions, of the home she is
asked to make.

The boarding-school-educated and college girl has never been trained
to perform or to endure the difficult, necessary duties of the poor
man’s home. In their girlhood’s homes and luxurious schools, everything
was done for them. That was in the old, almost-forgotten days of cheap
domestic service.

In no other direction, perhaps, has there been so great and so
far reaching changes as in the homes of the so-called upper classes.
In a sense, to-day we have no homes, only places in which we sleep,
and sometimes eat. For the domestic work of preparing the food and
keeping the home as a place to live in and not to escape from has, in
great measure, ended; duties which once it was every woman’s pride
to do well, have been allowed to slip, as far as possible, into the
hands of hired experts. In the old days cooking and housekeeping, and
even house-cleaning, were known to all women. Every wife was expected
to enter into competition with other wives in the important matters of
making bread and cakes, and in making jams and jellies and puddings.

But the home, with its old full activities, has passed out of the hands
of the mistress. So to-day a girl often finds herself forced to learn
the very elements of the routine day of the wage-earner’s wife. And the
duties that have to be learnt are many of them disagreeable as well as
immensely tiring and monotonous to unaccustomed hands.

I do not, however, believe that the knife-and-fork aspect of these
marriages is the fundamental aspect. It is love itself that is at
fault. The strain and the jar of daily living under these difficult
restless conditions have been too great, especially for the women.

The passing from one way of living, from one station of society to
another, is always a hard and unpleasant process. We do not always know
it or admit it, even if we _do know_, but the small, almost unnoticed
differences in habits and manners are harder to tolerate than many a
more fundamental cleavage.

I want to labour this point. The most frequent causes of trouble in
those marriages where there is poverty and a restricted life, are born,
I am certain, out of the daily fret of uncomfortable and cheap living
together, out of small ugly minor habits of omissions, and stupidities.

Romantics may deny this, but what most wears and frays the love of
wives are just trifles so small that very rarely is their adverse
action directly noticed. But they give an escape for the concealed
hostility, and set up an almost indecent and fearfully intolerant
irritation. Dirty finger nails, the murdering of words, or making
a noise when you eat soup, may be much harder to bear than real
unkindness and anger. The failure to rise and give up a chair or to
open a closed door may seem greater neglect to a wife than the absence
of money to buy presents. The roughness of the “rough diamond” becomes
unbearable. Things that once did not seem to matter, now matter
tremendously.

Of course this is illogical, but then love is illogical.

And month by month as it passes makes the marriage more broken. The
disappointment goes deeper though the irritation may, perhaps, be
less frankly expressed. This is the time of the real danger. It is
the wife’s own love that is failing her, much more than anything her
husband may do or not do.

The difficulty of finding suitable work, the differences in friends and
in the accustomed spheres of life, could be overcome were it not for
the _unconscious want of will to overcome them_. The man may feel that
he would do better farming in Canada than here. It is a very certain
indication that the woman has ceased to love him wholeheartedly if
she objects to accompany him on the ground that all her friends are in
England.

Love does not hesitate: it delights to give up and to sacrifice.

You will see what this means: It is rather the _hidden feelings that
make conscious social difference_, that act and are far stronger than
the difference itself.

The unacknowledged failure in Love, not anything that happens
outwardly, is the real trouble that gnaws at the root of content in
their marriages, and rots and breaks the bond.

Yet there is a bright side to these marriages even when they fail. The
socially adventurous, the breakers of conventions, must expect trouble;
but they may console themselves by reflecting that they are pioneers in
opposing dead traditions. Only the tall trees sway in the breeze, the
dwarf plants are ingloriously safe.




IS MARRIAGE TOO EASY?


On the subject of marriage I have written again and again, not alone
in these essays, but in many of my other books. I would, however, wish
to say now, and with all the power I have, that in England, marriage
is made too easy. If some of the restrictions which are placed against
the breaking of the marriage bond were transferred to the time when the
bond is made it would be well.

We prevent too late. Always we run to shut the stable door after the
horse is stolen.

Many amazing marriages are made, in particular, by the very young who
to-day refuse, more fiercely than even before, any guidance from the
old; reckless marriages, entered into by those who have known each
other for a few days only before marrying for life.

An ever-increasing freedom and independence for the young has certainly
had rather a startling moral result. It has been shewn that for all
ordinary young men and women intimate association with each other in
college, in business, in workshops, and factories, and in play, turns
them with extreme readiness to love making. Now I am very far indeed
from wishing to apportion blame, but I do hold that new conditions
demand—not only changes in our thoughts and judgment, but revision of
the laws formulated to restrict conduct.

A minister of religion stated publicly, not very long ago, “I have had
to marry many couples who admitted to me they knew little about each
other. I could do nothing. I was not allowed to refuse marriage.”

The many marriages made in haste and under the pressure of sudden
emotional urgencies, are a sign of the nervous condition of the
times. The customary criticisms of reason are not heard, or not until
the emotional storm has subsided. This is, of course, a condition
not infrequent in love, but in these rushing and exciting days of
dancing-partners and jazz courtships, it is greatly exaggerated, such
marriages may not unfortunately bear the scrutiny of minds restored to
reason. Living together is found to be a different and far harder thing
than dancing together. And this has led to the unprecedented demand for
divorce which should cause no surprise or lamentation, but should urge
us forward to face the situation, like spurs in the flesh of a tired
horse. For the disgrace is, not that these marriages should end, but
that they should ever have begun.

We English are too afraid of preventative interference: we wait until
something is very wrong indeed and then we punish.

It would be salutary for us to consider the more careful regulations of
other lands. In France, for instance, and in Belgium no encouragement
is given for hurried marriages such as we permit. Official enquiries
and the consent of parents and guardians are considered necessary. From
the start the greatest care is exercised. _Fiançailles_ (engagements)
are regarded as serious family events, more binding and more sacred
than anything to which we are accustomed. Both the engagement
and the marriage are affairs of the utmost importance to the two
families concerned as well as to the young people themselves. There
are discussions and careful arrangements, and months of testing of
suitability for life-partnership, during which the future husband and
wife get to know one another before being tied by marriage. Perhaps,
this is why the crime of bigamy is very rare in France, and there is no
such thing known as cases for breach of promise of marriage.

I know, of course, the many and great evils that are attendant on the
French system, but to me it seems that these could easily be avoided
as they arise entirely out of property considerations and the wife’s
dowry—considerations which so inevitably act disastrously on moral
conduct.

It would, I am certain, lessen the chance of endless unhappiness in
marriage and prevent many divorces if some more fixed inquiries,
with—in the case of any one (shall I say, under twenty-five?) the
consent of one parent of either party, if living, if not, that of a
guardian, were obligatory before the marriage could be entered into. Or
if the young will not accept this parental authority, marriage could be
made conditional, except under very special reasons, on the betrothal
months having lasted for a fixed and sufficiently long period: at least
inquiry should be made as to the amount of knowledge the partners have
gained of each other. I would recommend these reforms to all who are
concerned for the future of marriage.

Nor need the change be difficult or would it entail any great
alterations in the machinery of the law. We appoint a King’s Proctor
to inquire into domestic details to prevent unsuitable marriages being
broken, why not change his duties to prevent unsuitable marriages being
made?

I would urge also that Commandments of Marriage are formulated to be
read to every couple at their betrothal and again before the wedding
ceremony takes place, as is done to some limited extent in France and
Belgium and in one or two other countries. This is another duty which
might be undertaken by the department of the King’s Proctor.

Here, then, is a practical way in which we might wisely copy other
civilisations whose customs are more carefully planned to safeguard
marriage and help the young in right living.

I must press home this question of the dangers of too easy marriage,
though I risk wearying my readers by repetition. The facilities we
give the young for marrying in haste, is, I affirm again, the cause
mainly responsible in the greater number of marriages that come to
the disaster of the Divorce Courts. This I have proved already. It is
responsible also for many cases of bigamy, a crime which has increased
alarmingly in the last years. Our law of breaches of marriage promises,
with its frequent misuse and extortion of hushmoney, is another cause
dependent on our stupid neglect to regulate marriage. It leads to many
unsuitable marriages being made, which very often have their fatal
sequel of separation or divorce.

Nor does the disaster end here. Our present careless laws are certainly
acting to bring marriage itself to discredit. We hurry young people
within its bonds, freeing them from all obligations to their families
or to society in this matter of choosing their life’s partner, and then
later, if disaster overtakes them, with callous irony we say, “you have
made your bed, you must lie on it.”

If we desire really to preserve marriage, let us treat marriage with
seriousness. As I have said in another of these essays—Marriage is not
considered a vocation: it has become a game. I would urge practical
and prompt action. We are, I think, bound to realise that if we are
to succeed in freeing our society from the evils which all of us are
deploring, our attention must shift from attempts to _punish after
wrong has been done_, to removing the causes that _lead certainly to
wrong being done_.

In other words we have to formulate more practical and helpful laws.
Even more important is to change public thought, cleansing men and
women from their desire to punish and replacing instead the desire to
help and to understand. Nothing else, in my opinion, can avert even
greater disasters of license in the future than those we are facing.




PASSIONATE FRIENDSHIPS


I had wished to write these essays without too frequent mention of the
war. I find, however, that such avoidance is almost impossible. For the
war has, in the most effective way, made prominent all the problems of
sexual conduct with which I am dealing, has done this so effectively
that some way out must be found. New and even startling changes have
come and are coming, and have to be faced. Certainly our judgments
can never be the same. Many who never before thought about these
things have been made to think. All of us have seen more plainly the
ineffectiveness of much that always before we had accepted. No longer
can we cover our eyes with the comfortable mid-Victorian bandages.
There has ended for every one of us our blind-man’s-buff game with life.

We are caught: and it is well. The unwritten commandment of sexual
conduct, that anything may be done as long as the doing of it may be
hidden, can never, I think, again be accepted, unless, indeed, by
the very good, whose entire lack of humour makes them able to accept
anything.

Whether we like it or not most of us have got now to muck-rake into the
dark bye-paths of conduct.

Now, it is easy to say that this urgent concern with sexual questions
arises from decadence. I do not believe it. To me it has always seemed
that this growing demand for inquiry affords the surest hope for the
future. Much is being thrown on to the scrap-heap of life. This is
done only when there is need for it. We, who have come to see and in
some measure to understand, have got to be concerned with sex and its
problems, until some of its wrongs are righted.

Here I must digress to make a necessary explanation. The special
problem of sexual conduct which now I wish to consider—the very
difficult problem of passionate friendships between men and women who,
for one reason or another, are unable or do not wish to marry, is a
question to which my interest has for very long been directed. I was
first asked to write about it in 1913 (how remote that time now seems)
in answer to two articles that had appeared in the _English Review_, in
July and August of that year, _Women and Morals_ and _Men and Morals_,
supposed to have been written, the one by “A Mother,” and the other
by “A Father;” but which, as later transpired, were thought out and
transcribed in the office, by the Editor and sub-Editor of that then
courageous journal.

But to whatever journalistic trickery they owed their origin, the
interest of those articles remained unchanged. I need not wait to
describe them; their importance rested in the courage and truth with
which they faced the difficult problem, at that time almost always
hidden or sentimentalised over, of the sex-needs of men and women apart
from marriage.

I was asked to answer—I had, as it were, to sum up, sift out, weigh and
judge, what was said in both articles. I did not then know anything of
their bastard authorship, and I accepted. My answer appeared in the
September number of the Review. At the time it gained some attention.
In America the three articles were republished together. The little
book, called “Women and Morals” had an exceedingly attractive cover and
an excellent preface: I believe it sold widely. More amusing and also,
I think, more witness to the power of my work, was a very different
kind of notoriety which, in one quarter at least, it achieved in this
country. It aroused anger. The number of the _English Review_ in which
it appeared was, I believe, burnt publicly in an Advanced Club for
women by order of the ladies who then formed the committee. For their
intense virtue considered my views too horrible to remain uncleansed
by fire. (Excuse my laughing, but the fact is I always do laugh when I
picture this incident—those splendidly blinkered women holding solemnly
in extended fire-tongs that burning review!)

My work was immoral!

Immoral! What is it that people mean? I do not know. I am for morality
and always shall be. That is, indeed, why I offend. I am always wanting
to turn out dirty places and to spring-clean life. And I have to show
things as I find them, not as I would like them to be. It is so easy if
you drug your soul and place blinkers over your intelligence. But you
cannot be moral if you are over-occupied with being nice.

It is the young, not the old, who are thinking and writing to-day.
Let me give you an example that exactly fits this question we are
considering.

By a somewhat suggestive coincidence there appeared an article on
“Youth and Marriage” in the _English Review_ for May, 1923—the last
number issued under the editorship of Mr. Austin Harrison—which very
strikingly repeats, but more openly and with cruder emphasis, almost
everything that was said in the three articles published in 1913.
It treats the same difficult and still unsettled question of sexual
relationships outside of marriage. The article gives the answer of
youth to the old, who are criticising and condemning the friendships
and new freedom of sex intimacy between young women and young men: they
are told frankly that they fail to realise the changed conditions of
present-day life. The name of the writer of this interesting article,
Vera M. Garrell, is unknown to me, but I take this opportunity of
thanking her. Her article has given me the greatest pleasure. All the
facts are considered in a refreshingly candid, if not always entirely
adequate way. (1) The increased enormous disparity between the numbers
of the sexes, which the writer comments upon as “an outstanding tragedy
of the war;” leading as it must do, to “an unhealthy competition to
attract men,” under the urge of which girls are drawn “to use coarser
measures and act on bolder lines,” if they are to escape “the dark
dread that haunts the average girl of being ‘left on the shelf.’” (2)
The economic factors, which cause marriage to become increasingly
difficult, and thus act in lowering the marriage ideal by making a
permanent union so remote that it comes to be regarded as “practically
impossible.” “The young people of to-day are very much realists. They
intensely dislike poverty.” A great deal is said about this “economic
blockade against marriage,” and the writer maintains that “much of the
laxity in sexual morals is the direct outcome of this position.” (3)
Yet, even deeper in their action are the inner reasons. War has left
the youth of to-day “with a kind of sexual neurosis.” For years it kept
life “entirely physical;” “morality was at a discount,” the inescapable
result has been that “youth has been lured into sexual compromise.” The
old code of morality has failed: it does not meet the new demands.

I have been impressed and sharply hurt at the bitterness and fatalism
underneath what is written. Let me quote one or two sentences. “The
charge against youth is correct. He is in revolt against conventional
morality. _Young men and young women are sex conscious, not on the old
lines of retiring from intimacy, but rather in the opposite direction
of intimacy._” And again, “Every sex companionship is born of _mutual
recognition of social grievances_. Where it is possible for men and
women to come together and form friendships they do so, _without any
regard for the commital convention that marriage must be the object_.”
(The italics in the passages are mine.)

It is insisted upon that every normal person has a right to
self-expression in the sex-function, while further frank
acknowledgement is made that when sex-friendship “_is unregulated it
ends in vice_.” “_We shall not marry so why not enjoy ourselves_,” is
the prevailing philosophy of those who have ceased to regard the sexual
act as immoral. (Again the italics are mine).

Now, all this has set me thinking that it is worth while to restate
certain propositions in connection with these friendships of passion,
which I made first in the article I wrote in 1913. I do this for two
reasons. First I would like to assure the young, who to-day are more
than ever impatient of, and condemnatory of, the old, that the old are
not always ignorant and that some of them, too, have tried honestly
to face this difficult problem of sexual conduct. The second reason
is deeper. A sickness of soul cries out from so much that the young
say to-day. I want to end this. And the only way in which I know to do
this in connection with these unregulated friendships is to _have them
regulated_.

It is ridiculous to say as so many of the young do to-day that sexual
relationships between two people affect no one but themselves, unless a
child is born. It is not true. The partners in even the strongest and
purest union have no right to say to society, “This is our business and
none of yours.” The consequences may be so grave and wide-reaching for
society that the sex-deed can never be confined to the pair concerned.

And I would go further even than this. For the sexual partnership that
is kept secret, almost of necessity, will work anti-socially. Just in
the same way as in any other secret partnership, opportunity will be
given to those who desire to escape from the responsibilities of the
partnership. This inevitably leads to the commital of sin, by those
who are weak and unfixed in character. While other men and women of
higher conscience, who wish to, and would act honourably, often find
the way so difficult that they fail in their endeavours—lose themselves
in the dark and tangled ways of concealment. Many unions that now are
shameful, would not have been shameful, if the partners had not been
drawn into deceitful concealments, that cannot fail to act in a way
disastrous to love.

This problem of Passionate Friendships, like all problems of sexual
conduct, demands something more than emotional treatment; it requires
the most careful consideration of many different sets of facts, that
often rise up in what seem to be direct opposition.

I must follow this a little further. The sex-needs are almost always
dealt with as though they stood apart and lay out of line with any
other need or faculty of our bodies. This is, in part, due to secrecy
which has kept sex as something mysterious. We have most of us been
trained from our childhood into indecent secretiveness. There is as
well deeper trouble, and it will be a long time before we can change
it. Sex is so powerful in most of us, and occupies really so large
a part of our attention, that we are afraid of ourselves, and this
re-acts in fear of any open acknowledgement of our sex-needs.

It is necessary before we can even begin to judge this question of
passionate friendships, to face very frankly this tremendous force
of the sex-impulses, for the most part veiled in discussion. Next to
hunger this is the most imperative of our needs, and, indeed, to-day
sex enters more into conscious thought than hunger. For the hunger
needs of most of us are satisfied, while the sex-needs are thwarted and
restrained in all kinds of ways, and thus insist themselves the more
insistently in our thoughts. Here is some slight explanation why so
many of our judgments about sex are so arbitrary and so unforgiving.
In penalising the sexual misconduct of others we are really passing
judgment, though we do not know it, on our ourselves in blaming them we
gain a curious kind of vicarious salvation, which brings the peace of
self-forgiveness. In devising punishments for others, we are fixing a
compensatory sacrifice for our deeply buried wishes, which never having
found relief, either in direct expression or by sublimation, remain to
torment us with ceaseless conflicts in our unconscious life.

I must not follow this further. Anyone with knowledge of the new
psychology will understand what I mean.

Now, what I want to emphasise is that, to some limited extent at any
rate, this system of self-concealments and lies is being broken,
or if that view is too hopeful, at least the point of view has
shifted. Indeed it is the acceptance of the imperative force of sex
hunger, and the frank recognition of the present position—a fearless
acknowledgment of the natural right of every adult woman as well as man
to sex experience, that renders so noteworthy the change in outlook
between this generation and the last. The youth of to-day have been
fearless enough to cry aloud desires that the men and women of my
generation, either denied or whispered about. Within its limits (and
I am bound to say that, in my opinion, these limits are badly fixed
and very narrow), this is the most truthful generation that yet has
existed. I am glad to have lived to know it.

It is true that the many difficult problems of sexual conduct, of
which we hear so much and so continuously, in almost every case are
approached from one side only—the personal-pleasure side. That is why
there is so much waste and foolishness. It explains too, why there
is no consistent and united movement; no attempt at trying to find
for everyone some possible decent way out—an escape from the terrible
conditions which we are all agreed exist under the difficulties and
strain of our under-controlled and over-civilised life.

A new conception of morality is, indeed, called for, but we have to
be clearer as to what it is to be and where it is taking us. You will
see at once what I mean. Until new safeguards are established, the old
restriction cannot safely be loosened. It is too dangerous. The brief
passionate partnership must entail disaster, in particular for the
woman. She must still pay the heavier price of love. For what do these
partnerships really mean? There can be no glossing with talk about
freedom here. It is the old solution, the giving by the woman _without
security_, what is given by the woman who is married under security and
permanence.

I do not believe this can be accepted as an established and permitted
thing as soon as we come to consider the lasting results.

It is an essential part of sexual morality, as I conceive it, that in
any relation between the two sexes—I care not whether the association
be legal or illegal, recognised or unrecognised—the position of the
woman, _as the potential mother_ must be made secure. This is a social,
not a private matter. As such it has always been accepted by a wise
State: it is the disgrace of our lax civilisation that too often to-day
it is forgotten or ignored.

We come then to this—How can provision be made for honourable
partnerships with _security for the woman_ outside of marriage? For
I am altogether persuaded that this provision must be made in order
to harmonise our sexual life, and meet the desires of a large and
increasing number of young people, whose exceptional needs our existing
institutions and customs ignore or crush.

We must all of us know from our experience of life that many women
as well as men are by their temperaments unsuited for monagonious
marriage—the living permanently with one partner for life. Often,
I would even say as a rule, these individuals are strongly sexual.
They will not, because with the character they have, they cannot,
live for any long period celibate. They will marry to gain permanent
sexual relief or, if they are men, they will buy temporary relief from
prostitutes, unless they are able to seek satisfaction in an irregular
union.

Now, I affirm it as my conviction that the first and second of these
courses are likely to lead to greater misery and sin than the third
course; and of the three, the first, in my opinion, is the worst. I
have, no doubt at all on this matter. No one, who is not blind to the
facts of life, can close their eyes to the evil and suffering that
certainly follows, when permanent marriage is entered into by those
people who are unfitted _and do not desire_ to fulfil the obligations
and duties of living faithfully with one partner. And I would ask all
those who stand in fear of change or reform, and cannot contemplate
any open toleration of wider opportunities for sexual friendships to
consider this fact: the discredit which has fallen upon marriage arises
largely from the demoralising lives lived under its cover by those
unsuited for enduring mating.

It is commonly taken for granted that love and passion in men is quite
different from love and passion in women. I am sure this is not true.
It is very necessary to break down the idea that for the impulses of
sex, with their immense complications and differences, there is one
general rule. Nor is it possible, I am sure, to make any for arbitrary
judgments. To me the man or woman who is able to live in faithful love
with one partner is not necessarily better than the man or woman who
is not so able. I may prefer the one type, and dislike the other, but
that again is a matter of personal judgment. We cannot safely class
those who differ from ourselves as wrong, and set them down as fit only
for suppression and education. We have to put aside the old shrieks of
blame that are possible only to the ignorant.

It is all very well to preach the ideal of complete sexual abstinence
until marriage, but there are the clear, hard conditions of
contemporary circumstances for all but the really rich, who can marry
when they want to do so without other considerations, and the very poor
who marry young because they have nothing at all to consider. We have
to face the presence among us to-day of an amount of suffering through
enforced celibacy, which is acting in many directions in degrading our
sexual lives. Any number of these sufferers, both the unmarried and
the married who are ill-mated, are everywhere amongst us. I need not
wait to prove this: the facts face us all, unless, indeed, we are too
wilfully blind and too prejudiced to see what is happening.

I would propose as a first step towards honesty and health, that we
ought to claim an open declaration of the existence of any form of
sexual relationship between a woman and a man. We shall, I believe,
have to do it, if not now, then later, because we are finding out the
evils that must ensue, both to the individuals concerned and to the
society of which they are members, by forcing men and women into the
dark, immoral way of concealments.

I believe if there were some open recognition of these partnerships
outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, with proper provision
for the woman and her children, should there be any, a provision not
dependent on the generosity of the man and made after the love which
sanctioned the union had waned, but decided upon by the man and woman
in the form of a contract before the relationships were entered upon,
there would be many women ready to undertake such unions gladly; there
would even be some women as well as men, who, I believe, would prefer
them to permanent marriage, which binds them to one partner for life
and as a rule entails mutual living together and the giving up by the
woman of her work or profession. In this way many marriages would be
prevented which inevitably come to disaster. It is also possible that
such friendship-contracts might, under present disastrous conditions,
be made by those who are unsuitably mated and yet are unable or do
not wish to entirely sever the bond between them, with some other
partner they could love. Such contracts would open up possibilities of
honourable partnership to many who must suffer from enforced sexual
abstinence or be driven into hateful concealed intimacies.

I do not think we need fear to do this. My own faith in monogamous
marriage, the living together of one man and one woman for the life of
both, as the most practical, the best, and the happiest form of union
for the great majority of people, is so strongly rooted that I do not
wish, because I hold it unnecessary, to force anyone either to enter or
stay within its bonds. I want them to do this because they themselves
want to be bound. We get further and further away from real monogamy
by allowing no other form of honourable partnerships.

Under present conditions and the prejudice of social opinion, the
penalties that have to be paid in particular by women, for any sexual
relationship outside of marriage are too heavy. This is manifest as
I have, to some extent, pointed out already. Indeed when we consider
the difficulties faced in these unions, that so many do take the risks
is another proof, if one were needed of the elemental strength of the
sex-impulse. But mark this: it is only those whose social conscience
is for some reason unawakened who can enter into these irregular
relationships except under special and very exceptional circumstances,
until some steps have been taken to regulate them. They may be willing
to take the risk for themselves, but they know, or perhaps I had better
say _ought to know_, that the payment may fall also on the child of
their love. You may say—there need be no children. This is true. It
makes the conditions of such love much easier. It is not, however, a
solution and can never, I think, be accepted as such by women. The
woman who loves a man wants to be the mother of a child by him. I shall
be told that there are women of whom this is not true. I know this. But
that does not make it less true that the great majority of women can
find the completion of their love only in the child.

It would, of course, be easy to raise any number of objections against
these contract-partnerships, some of which might well prove true.
It may be said, for instance, that the economic difficulties that
now prevent marriage would not be lessened, but increased, by these
extra-conjugal relationships. This is a question on which so much ought
to be said that I feel compelled to say almost nothing, as I cannot now
treat it adequately. I can only say that I have in my mind some scheme
of insurance, which might easily be contributed to by both partners of
the contract, but which would go to the woman for her own provision,
and that of any children of the union in case of separation. If this
once became established as a custom (a kind of marriage settlement,
but without the marriage) necessary between all entering into such
partnerships, the practice would gain the support of public opinion. It
is done frequently now, but secretly. What I want is that it should
be done openly, as a right and not a favour. It would then be possible
to take another step in the form of State endowment for parenthood;
this might be an extension of endowment for legal motherhood and
mother’s pensions, and by doing this would follow another and, perhaps,
even greater gain. The recognition of these contract-partnerships
would prevent the ostracism which even to-day falls on the discarded
mistress. There are many women who dread this much more than poverty.
The whole question of any sexual relationships outside of marriage in
the past has been left in the gutter, so to speak. Everything has been
blotted in darkness and made disgraceful by concealment. This would be
changed.

May not something be done now, when in so many directions we are
being forced to consider these questions, to establish sanction to
meet new needs? Partnerships other than marriage have had a place as
a recognised and guarded institution in many older and more primitive
societies, and it may be that the conditions brought upon us may act in
forcing upon us a similar acceptance.

We have got to recognise that our form of monogamous marriage cannot
meet the sex-needs of all people. To assert that it can do this is
to close our eyes to the known facts. Something has got to be done.
The extending of the opportunities of honourable love must be faced
before we can hope for more moral conditions of life. It is the results
that have almost always followed these irregular unions that have
branded them as anti-social acts. But the desertion of women with the
inevitable resulting evils, which has arisen so frequently from the
conditions of secrecy under which they now exist, would be put an end
to. One reason why extra-conjugal relationships are discredited is
because it is often almost impossible to avoid disaster. Make these
partnerships honourable and there will be much greater chances of
honourable conduct. I spoke just now of the sacrifice of women. But in
love there is no such thing as sacrifice for a woman; there is the joy
of giving. The sacrifice arises out of the conditions of concealment
and blame under which the duties and joys of love so often have had to
be fulfilled.

I do not see how we can forbid or treat with contempt any partnership
that is openly entered into and in which the duties undertaken are
faithfully fulfilled. It is our attitude of blame that has, in
the past, so often made this honourable fulfilment of obligations
impossible.

I have sought to put these matters as plainly as may be in the
conviction that nothing can be gained by concealment. Anyone who writes
on the subject of sexual conduct is very open to misconceptions. It is
not realised that the effort of the reformer is not to lessen at all
the bonds in any sexual partnership, rather the desire is to strengthen
them. But the forms of the partnership will have to be more varied;
unless, indeed, we prefer to accept unregulated and secret vice. We
shall, I do most sincerely believe, have more morality in too much
wideness than in too little.

I can anticipate a further objection that will certainly be raised.
Why, I shall be asked, if sexual relationships are to be acknowledged
and protected outside of marriage, preserve marriage at all? I have
answered this question already. _Monogamous marriage will be maintained
because the great majority of women and men want it to be maintained._
I affirm again my own belief in the monogamic union: the ideal marriage
is that of the man and woman who have dedicated themselves to each
other for the life of both, faithfully together to fulfil the duties
of family life. This is the true monogony: this is the marriage which
I regard as sanctified. But, I, regarding it as a holy state, would
preserve it for those suited for the binding duties of the individual
home so intimately connected with it.

The contract-partnerships I have suggested will do nothing to change
the sanctity of any true marriages. There will always remain a penalty
to those who seek variety in love, in that unrest which is the other
side of variety. And the answer I would give to those who fear an
increase of immorality from any provision for sexual partnerships
outside of permanent marriage is, that no deliberate change in our
sexual conduct can conceivably make moral conditions worse than they
are at present. As a matter of fact every form of irregular union
exists to-day, but shamefully and hidden. The only logical moral
objection that I can think of being advanced against an honourable
recognition of these partnerships is that, by doing away with all
necessity for concealments their number is likely to be larger than if
the old penalties are maintained. This is undoubtedly true: it is also
true that it is the only possible way in which they can cease to be
shamefull. Prohibitions and laws, however stringent, can do nothing.
The past has proved their failure; they will fail still worse in the
future.

Nor is the change really so great or so startling as at first it
may appear to be. Our marriage in its present form is primarily an
arrangement for the protection of the woman and the family. What I want
is that some measure, at least, of the protection now given to the
legal wife, shall be afforded to all women who fulfil the same duties.
I am not seeking to make immorality easier; as I have before insisted,
that is very far from my purpose. These changes for which I am pleading
will make immorality much harder, for it will not be so easy as now it
is to escape from the responsibilities of love.

No one can suppose, of course, that this change can be other than
gradual. There will be no stage at which a large section of society
will give up the accepted custom and stand perplexed as to how they
shall readjust their sexual conduct. Any movement towards openness and
honesty must be gradual. The process of change will be in the future,
what has always happened in the past, the slow abandonment of worn-out
conventions, and a trial of new paths, first by the few, to be followed
by an ever-increasing number. When the need for a change arises then
does a change come.

I assert again there need be no fear.

It is one of the deepest and healthiest instincts of men and women that
they have always fought for liberty to love, and have rebelled whenever
the restrictions and conditions of society have borne too hardly
upon them. There is first a period of dull acquiescence, followed
certainly by a reaction towards pleasure and sin—the grabbing to take
what has been withheld by any means and in any form; but afterwards
comes rebellion—the true movement towards purity; the deep desire of a
return to health, necessitating always the breaking through from all
hindering barriers, so that the intolerable burden of sin may be cast;
a glad imperative effort to gain liberty, to live rightly and joyously.

It is the young who to-day have a new consciousness of the right of
freedom. They will never again accept the ancient restrictions. And it
is well. We, who are older, whose steps are faltering and whose eyes
grow dim with waiting for the vision we have seen, look to them to gain
liberty, to re-establish the sanctity of love, which we have tried to
do and failed.

But the young must shake off every symptom of the prevalent and
contagious anaemia of fatalism that limits everything to the personal
issues, before they can formulate and carry through any really
constructive work of reform. They must learn to distinguish more
clearly between cause and effect, the means and the end. At present
they place the horse after the cart and mistake the power for the
product. We are all apt to suppose conduct and feelings are the outcome
of conditions and laws. They are not: they are the origin of them. When
we have all got the desire for right and honourable conduct and honest
conduct and honest feelings both about marriage and every form of
sexual partnership, we shall get living and helpful laws.

What is the use of tinkering with what is moribund? A great teacher has
said, “Let the dead bury their dead; come and preach the good and the
new thing.”




CONCLUSION

REGENERATION


I have dared to think of a regeneration of our sexual lives through
education and a fuller understanding of the meaning of love. But by
education must be understood all that influences the desires and
imagination, so that in every direction we shall be turned to seek
health and clean living.

Our supine acceptance of so many things that are wrong ought to arouse
us to shame. What are we going to do?

Are we content to go on in the muddles that so long we have accepted
without much consideration? Are we satisfied to allow all the evil to
continue because we are too lazy and too dishonest to face them in
truth and demand a clearance? We are all responsible; you, my readers,
and I. If we demand saner and more practical conditions we shall get
them.

But do we care—I mean care sufficiently to seek and to find the way of
escape? Ah, that is the question!

Fear has been the hot-bed wherein have been forced rank plants of
shame, dishonesty and trickery, of uncleanness, of concealments, of
persecution and punishments—plants of persistent but unhealthy growth,
that insistently and riotously spring up to hinder the workers, who
strive ever to clear the soil of the fair Garden of Love, from the rank
and choking growths.

What wonder, indeed, that we have lost our way so that still we are
wandering in the jungle, unable to steer a straight course through the
rough and tortuous paths left to us as a legacy from the past. It is
this confusion that is hindering us to-day. And our real task is to
cut through the jungle, and force clear paths, so that again we may
have good roads in an open country on which we may walk gladly and
fearlessly.

Yet, it were unwise to be too hopeful. We cannot be architects of life.
Each generation will make new mistakes, even do they escape the follies
that are old. We can see a very short way along the path of life, and
often we are confused. The wisest amongst us are only bricklayers, and
the best can but lay two or three bricks in a lifetime. Our work is to
do that if we can. We can guess very feebly at the whole design. Many
mistakes must be made by us, as they have been by those before us, and
often it may be the duty of a new generation to pull down the work that
in sorrow we have toiled to build up.




FOOTNOTES:

[1] The English Edition was translated from the French Edition.

[2] See a most instructive pamphlet, “The Conflicts of the Child,” by
Edith and Dr. Eder, reprinted from “Child Study,” 1917.

[3] See the pamphlet to which already reference has been made.

[4] This frequently quoted statement was made by Lombroso and not by
Krafft-Ebing as almost everyone seems to think. It is significant that
the women on the study of whose sexuality this judgment was founded
were of the prostitute class. See _La Donna Delinquente_, etc., p.p.
54-56.




INDEX


  A

  Adoption of Children 61;
    law needed 61 _et seq._;
    fears and dangers in 62 _et seq._


  B

  Birth control 37 _et seq._, 163.

  Boys, seduction of 113 _et seq._, 119 _et seq._


  C

  Cats, 15;
    their qualities compared with those of women 16 _et seq._

  Child, effect of birth control on 39;
    feeling of inferiority in 49;
    inferiority and crime in 49;
    must rebel 51 _et seq._ 82, 94, 103;
    adoption of, law of needed 61;
    faults and crimes of 73 _et seq._ 99;
    in prison 73 _et seq._;
    at modern school 79 _et seq._;
    at play 81;
    sex education of 87 _et seq._, 107 _et seq._;
    early manifestation of sex in 88 _et seq._;
    savagery of 97;
    marriage founded on 136 _et seq._

  Concealment, evils of 178 _et seq._

  Curiosity, 101, 109 _et seq._


  D

  Dangerous Age, the 29 _et seq._

  Doctors and Patients’ secrets 157 _et seq._

  Dogs, 59, 60.


  E

  Economics, mania for, 158 _et seq._

  Education, sex 87 _et seq._


  F

  Father, daughter’s feeling for 54;
    the intruder 55 _et seq._, 95;
    after birth of child 56;
    conflict with son 56;
    authority of, necessary 57;
    effect on child 91 _et seq._ 93;
    danger of being too fond of child 104.

  Faults of children 43 _et seq._, 73 _et seq._ 99.

  Freedom for children 80 _et seq._


  G

  Gentleman, the temporary 165 _et seq._

  Girls, and seduction of boys 113, 118;
    playing with love 127 _et seq._
    _See also_ Child.

  Garrell, Vera M. (on “Youth and Marriage”) 175.


  H

  Husband, the old-fashioned 161 _et seq._


  J

  Jealousy, 44, 55, 68, 93, 95, 103, 109, 136.


  L

  Law, reform in relation to   parentage 35 _et seq._;
    reform in relation to adoption 61 _et seq._;
    of adoption in other countries 67 _et seq._;
    in relation to mothers’ pensions 71;
    in relation to seduction 113 _et seq._;
    in relation to age of consent 117 _et seq._;
    White Slave Traffic 118 _et. seq._;
    marriage law in other countries 170.

  Lyttelton, Dr. (on sex instruction) 107.


  M

  Marriage, joy in 33; 133 _et seq._
    result of children 136 _et seq._;
    causes of failure in 139;
    altered views on 141 _et seq._;
    unfaithfulness of men in 145 _et seq._;
    of women 149 _et seq._;
    too easy 169 _et seq._;
    problem of unions outside 174 _et seq._
    _See also_ Birth Control.

  Michaelis, Karin 29 _et. seq._

  Mother, and child who steals 43 _et seq._;
    danger of being too fond of child 52 _et. seq._ 104;
    supreme with child 55, 72, 92;
    perfect and (childless) 59;
    difficulty of adoptions for 61 _et seq._;
    love, effect on child 91;
    and sex instruction 108 _et seq._;
    after birth of child 145 _et seq._;
    image of, sought in wife 161.


  N

  Neil, Judge 71 _et seq._


  O

  Old-fashioned husband 161 _et seq._


  P

  Pensions for mothers 71 _et seq._

  Play 81;
    love in 127 _et seq._

  Pleasure, search for 31, 133.

  Punishment of children 73 _et seq._, 84 _et seq._

  Parent, _See_ Father and Mother.


  R

  Racial types, best seen in women 20.

  Rebellion of children, necessary 51 _et seq._; 82; 94.

  Remorse, as temptation 46;
    not necessarily good 98.


  S

  Schools, poor law 72;
    for delinquent 77;
    modern and their errors 79 _et seq._

  Sex, education 87 _et seq._;
    early manifestation of 88;
    right age for 107 _et seq._

  Solitary confinement condemned 77.

  Son, who steals 43 _et seq._
    _See also_ Child.

  Spain 19 _et seq._;
    dancing in 21;
    workers (women) in 23 _et seq._


  W

  Wife, the modern 161 _et seq._

  Wife, the young 163 _et seq._

  Women, their qualities compared with those of cats 16 _et seq._;
    in Spain 19 _et seq._;
    racial types best seen in 20;
    as workers in Spain 23 _et seq._;
    approaching age, in terror of 30;
    search for pleasure in 31;
    false purity in 32;
    repression in 33;
    legal position of 35;
    childless 59;
    difficulties in adopting children by _et seq._ 61;
    seduction of men by 113 _et seq._, 118, 123;
    myth of superior purity 113 _et seq._;
    child more than husband to 145 _et seq._;
    attitude to sexual disease of 158 _et seq._

  Women, _See also_ Birth Control, Marriages, Mother, Wife, the modern,
    Gentleman, the temporary.


  _Clements Bros., Printers, Meeting House Lane, Chatham_